THE BEHEADING OF A PASSENGER ON A BUS IN 2008 RANKS AS ONE OF THE WORST CRIMES IN CANADA. BY GRANTING THE KILLER TOTAL FREEDOM, A REVIEW BOARD HAS TAKEN A GIANT LEAP OF FAITH. BLATCHFORD.
Law has been followed, but is the law right?
Into the great wide open, then, we all go — the Manitoba review board that granted Will Baker/ Vince Li total freedom, the people who believe in recovery and most of all in Baker himself, and those who do not or who are at the least uncertain.
And that really is the bottom line of the board’s decision last week to grant Baker an absolute discharge: It’s a leap of faith, fraught with unknowns.
He, of course, is the man who, before he changed his name and was known as Vince Li, beheaded and cannibalized Tim McLean, a 22-year-old passenger on the Edmonton-Winnipeg Greyhound bus, in 2008, a crime so ghastly it must rank as one of the worst in Canadian history.
Only after Baker was arrested and found not criminally responsible, or NCR, of second-degree murder in McLean’s slaying was he formally diagnosed with schizophrenia, treated with antipsychotics, counselled up the yin-yang, taught about his illness and how to manage it.
After a period of secure custody, he was granted incrementally more freedom and moved from hospital to group home and then, two years ago, to his own apartment, always with monitoring to ensure he took the drugs that keep psychosis at bay.
Those who have come to know him, like Chris Summerville, CEO of the Schizophrenia Society of Canada and executive director of the Manitoba chapter, believe Baker is a splendid candidate for success. He has done all he’s been asked, been compliant and cooperative, is so filled with remorse and sorrow about what he did he never wants to feel like that again, and most importantly, has insight into his disease.
And Baker, Summerville said in a phone interview from Winnipeg Monday, was never the one driving the absolute discharge vehicle.
“He never said, ‘I want complete control’ (over his life), he never had that kind of attitude,” he said, though Baker “does wish to get on with his life,” pursue some education, visit family in China.
Rather, Summerville said, the process was driven by the process itself — the governing law from the Supreme Court of Canada tells review boards that absent evidence of a real risk of harm that constitutes a “significant threat to the safety of the public,” boards “must order an absolute discharge.”
The SCC issued the decision in that case, known as Winko v British Columbia (Forensic Psychiatric Institute), in 1999.
Lawyers for Joseph Winko, a homeless man with chronic schizophrenia, challenged the B.C. review board’s decision to grant him only a conditional discharge, arguing the NCR provisions under the Criminal Code were unconstitutional.
And while the high court unanimously found they didn’t violate the Charter, a minority found “dangerousness” wasn’t quite the same thing as “significant threat to the public,” and “dangerousness” should be the threshold review boards used for the protection of the public.
As then-Justice Charles Gonthier wrote in the minority opinion, “I cannot accept that the preventive powers of Parliament under its criminal law jurisdiction are so limited and that principles of fundamental justice require that the risks arising from uncertainties in assessing the degrees of dangerousness must be entirely borne by the public to the point that even the least onerous and restrictive measures to the accused who is found to be dangerous cannot be ordered.”
In other words, if Gonthier’s reasoning had prevailed, it would have been possible for the review board to give Baker a discharge — but a conditional one, with a requirement that he be checked every three months, for instance, to make sure he was still taking his medication.
That’s the thing about schizophrenia — the prevalence of non-adherence with medication is high, and has been reported to range from 20 per cent to 56 per cent, according to a paper published in 2009 in Psychiatry Research.
There are many reasons why — some related to the illness, some to the patient — but it happens. So do successes: Many people with schizophrenia, particularly those with the insight Baker is said to have, “quietly fade away into the night and live as good citizens,” as Summerville says.
But there’s another tricky issue about schizophrenia. As a 2002 article published in the British Journal of Psychiatry noted, “It is now accepted that people with schizophrenia are significantly more likely to be violent than other members of the general population.”
The researchers reviewed the key literature on the epidemiology of violence and schizophrenia and said, “Most studies confirm the association … recent good evidence supports a small but independent association.”
Until the early 1980s, the consensus was that those with schizophrenia were no more likely than the general population to be violent,” they said then; but not now: “… a small subgroup of those with the disease are significantly more likely to be violent …”
Summerville doesn’t dispute either of those studies, but says, “That’s not the way it is with Mr. Baker.”
And finally, it’s worth remembering the jagged Canadian mental health care system did have an earlier go at helping Baker: As Vince Li, he was once briefly committed to hospital in Toronto years before his major psychotic break. And, as Summerville says, he was assessed, and started treatment, but “was allowed to leave the hospital too soon,” before the meds kicked in.
Now, a different arm of essentially the same broken system has let him go: It’s hard to see it as anything but a leap.