Finck denied parole for second time in ’06
By PATRICIA BROOKS ARENBURG Staff Reporter
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Larry Finck has been denied parole again.
The National Parole Board held a hearing Monday at Atlantic Institution in Renous, N.B., for Mr. Finck, the father at the centre of a 2004 police standoff in Halifax over his infant daughter.
The parole board found Mr. Finck unfit to release on either day or full parole, but the reasons for the decision weren’t available Monday. A written report is expected to be released today.
Monday’s hearing was scheduled after Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Charles Haliburton ordered that it be held in response to a court application by Mr. Finck.
The National Parole Board and Correctional Service Canada applied on Dec. 5 for a stay of proceedings to postpone the judge-ordered parole hearing until their appeal could be heard.
Justice Thomas Cromwell of the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal dismissed the application at a Dec. 7 hearing at the Halifax Law Courts. He said the applicants didn’t file notice in time and arrangements weren’t made to bring Mr. Finck from northern New Brunswick for the hearing. Also, Justice Cromwell wrote, even if "the judge may have erred in making the order he did," the applicants would suffer no irreparable harm if the hearing went ahead as scheduled.
This is the second time this year that Mr. Finck, serving a 4½-year sentence for his role in a 67-hour standoff and another four months for assaulting a fellow patient at a Dartmouth hospital, was denied parole.
In March, The Chronicle Herald reported that he was refused because he didn’t "acknowledge his crimes, did not have an acceptable release plan, did not take psychiatric counselling and refused to take courses that would improve his conflict resolution skills."
The May 2004 standoff began when police came to his mother’s Shirley Street house with a court order to remove his baby daughter from the house. The longest standoff in Halifax history ended when Mr. Finck and his wife, Carline VandenElsen, with their daughter strapped to her chest, walked out of the house carrying his dead mother on a stretcher. Mona Finck had died of natural causes. The baby was immediately seized by authorities.
Ms. VandenElsen, who is serving a 3½-year sentence at the Nova Institution for Women in Truro, was also denied parole earlier this year.
