A lawyer for Edmonton police says the specific facts of a child’s horrific homicide – coupled with mounting frustration with Alberta’s Crown Prosecution Service – led police to take the exceptional step of asking provincial justice officials to intervene in sentencing for the child’s killer.

Edmonton Police Service lawyer Megan Hankewich said officers learned “by happenstance” that there was a plea deal happening in the case Wednesday, in which the child’s stepmother would plead guilty to manslaughter and receive an eight-year sentence.

Ms. Hankewich said the eight-year-old’s homicide “remains one of the most horrifying cases of child abuse, and ultimately death from abuse, that our police service has ever seen.”