Woman convicted of disfiguring biting attack given reduced sentence because she's Haitian - National Post

A sign for the Quebec Court of Appeal. It’s an established Canadian legal precedent that judges are required to consider the “collateral immigration consequences” of a criminal sentence. Photo by Adobe StockArticle contentA Haitian woman who disfigured a stranger in a Montreal-area biting attack has been given a reduced sentence by a Quebec judge on the grounds that a harsher prison term would endanger her “precarious immigration status.”

Just two days after Christmas in 2022, Macdala Monfiston spent eight minutes viciously attacking a woman outside a bar in Laval, Que., leaving the victim with bite marks all over her arms and face.

Court records described one of the facial wounds as being “several centimetres long, necessitating repeated treatments and leaving a prominent scar.”

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Video of the assault obtained by The Journal de Montreal shows Monfiston pulling the victim’s hair, kicking her motionless form on the ground and straddling her body while biting at her face.

“When I tell people I was bit, they ask me what kind of animal, if it was by a pit bull. They can’t believe it’s a person who did this to me,” the victim told the paper in a French-language interview.

Although good Samaritans attempted to intervene, they were held back by Monfiston’s boyfriend.

After Monfiston pleaded guilty to aggravated assault in early 2025, a Court of Quebec judge sentenced her to four years in prison – the sentence already a fraction of the maximum 14-year sentence set for the crime under the Criminal Code.

But in a decision released this week, the Quebec Court of Appeal ruled that four years was too harsh, in part because it could possibly get her deported.

Under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, anyone jailed for longer than two years is deemed guilty of “serious criminality,” and loses their appeal rights in the case of a removal order.

“The prison sentence has a much greater impact on the defendant than on other offenders who might have committed similar acts,” reads the French-language decision, rendered on Sept. 14 by appeals court judges Suzanne Gagné, Christine Baudouin and Geneviève Marcotte.