Mosque killer could reintegrate, expert says
QUEBEC • A day after a psychologist said he believes Quebec mosque shooter Alexandre Bissonnette could eventually reintegrate into society, Crown prosecutor Thomas Jacques questioned him on some of the troubling personality traits the court has heard about the convicted killer.
Is it not true, Jacques asked psychologist MarcAndré Lamontagne in crossexamination Tuesday, that some of Bissonnette’s traits could make it harder for him to be rehabilitated?
“They could,” Lamontagne answered.
Jacques mentioned how different experts have described Bissonnette since the shooting: he has a rigid way of seeing things, an inability to let go of his thoughts and a hard time changing his mind.
He then quoted from a neuropsychological report, completed in July 2017, that described Bissonnette as immature, impulsive and arrogant, with a poor capacity for empathy and a tendency to manipulate.
Bissonnette, 28, has pleaded guilty to six counts of first-degree murder and six counts of attempted murder for his attack on the Quebec City mosque on Jan. 29, 2017.
On Tuesday morning, the court heard testimony from Sylvain Faucher, an expert in legal psychiatry.
Faucher had been mandated to determine whether Bissonnette was fit to plead guilty last month. He was asked to testify for the defence Tuesday on Bissonnette’s level of dangerousness and the reasons why he believes he was driven to kill.
He presented a sevenpage psychiatric report on Bissonnette. He said his age, intelligence and the fact he’s not particularly anti-social work in his favour.
But he also said people like Bissonnette, who committed such a serious first crime, are harder to evaluate using the usual psychiatric tools.
“Evaluating the dangerousness of someone is very difficult and is done without any certainties,” Faucher told Justice François Huot. “There is no such thing as zero risks.”
In his opinion, he said, Bissonnette’s attack on the mosque can be explained as a “quest for power.”
But above all, Faucher concluded, it was “to express all the resentment he’s accumulated from the acts of ostracization and intimidation he’s endured since the end of his primary education.”
Asked to determine why Bissonnette chose to attack the mosque, Faucher said his quest was nurtured by different sources.
“Be it the ideas of the current U.S. president on immigration, or the positions of the right and extreme rightwing media,” he wrote.
Bissonnette was looking for a target, Faucher said, and chose Muslims because of the times we live in. “At another time,” he wrote, “it could have been the Jews.”