Woman convicted of disfiguring biting attack given reduced sentence because she’s Haitian

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A 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.”

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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.

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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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“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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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The three judges instead handed down a sentence of two years minus one day, thus shielding Monfiston from any loss of her immigration appeal rights.

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It’s an established Canadian legal precedent that judges are required to consider the “collateral immigration consequences” of a criminal sentence.

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If a criminal conviction risks getting a foreign national removed from the country, judges must weigh this as a form of punishment, and then reduce the offender’s actual punishment accordingly.

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It all stems from the 2013 Supreme Court decision R. v. Pham. The case involved a non-citizen, Hoang Pham, who was convicted of drug offences and initially sentenced to two years in prison.

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The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that lower courts had failed to consider how the sentence would render Pham unable to appeal a removal order.