Addiction led to ‘crimes of desperation’: lawyer

Girlfriend denied knowing man when their images were caught by stores’ surveillance cameras

Defence lawyer Shelley Senior began her sentencing submissions for Jordan Mousseau-mitchell Wednesday by acknowledging he has a serious problem that only he can fix.

The 38-year-old has a grave addiction to opiates and cocaine, she said, and is still addicted, though he’s been in custody since February on a slew of theft charges.

“He got help (the last time he was in prison), but clearly not enough. He has to make up his own mind to do this, because he’s the only one who can change it,” Senior said.

“These crimes are crimes of desperation. These are not sophisticated crimes that he thinks he’s going to get away with. Certainly anyone with a criminal history like his knows that businesses have cameras everywhere. These are crimes of desperation, he was so addled by addiction.”

Mousseau-mitchell was facing 24 charges in total, including shoplifting, possession of a weapon, mischief for giving police a fake name, failing to show up in court as scheduled and breaching court orders. He pleaded guilty to most of them as part of a plea deal that saw the Crown withdraw some of the minor charges.

Among the thefts were incidents that were clearly not well planned, and involved him walking into a store, putting items in a bag and walking out. In one case, he and an accomplice took thousands of dollars’ worth of tablets from The Source; in another, he took half a dozen women’s coats off a rack at an Eclipse location and walked away. In most cases, he was immediately caught.

Mousseau-mitchell has been in custody since Feb. 8, when he was arrested for shoplifting from a Lawton’s drugstore in St. John’s by RNC officers who were already in the store, responding to an unrelated armed robbery that had occurred there earlier. When he was taken into custody, police found him to be carrying a wooden-handled knife with a foot-long blade in his back pocket.

Mousseau-mitchell was taken to hospital shortly after his arrest, after officers noticed him becoming drowsy and requiring assistance to stand. He told them he had injected eight opioid painkillers and eight Ativan prior to them apprehending him.

While in custody, Mousseaumitchell was charged with possessing stolen property — namely lottery tickets determined to have been taken during a break-in at Elaine’s Convenience in Portugal Cove the day before his arrest.

The serial numbers on the winning tickets were tracked to a handful of stores in the east end of St. John’s, where they had been cashed in, and video surveillance from those locations revealed a man and a woman as suspects. After police released their photos publicly, they received information that the couple was Mousseaumitchell and his girlfriend, Amanda Oliver.

Oliver, who contacted police upon seeing her photo online, was later cleared as a suspect. In an interview with The Telegram last spring, she called on police to publicly clear her name, saying her public connection with the crime had damaged her reputation. She insisted the male suspect was not Mousseau-mitchell and was a stranger to her, a man who had simply held the door to the store open for her when she entered and had no connection to her at all.

Oliver, whom Mousseaumitchell told the court Wednesday is no longer his girlfriend, since the pair had a “toxic relationship,” is facing an unrelated charge of shoplifting from a grocery store and will go to trial later this month.

Crown prosecutor Nicole Hurley is asking for 390 days behind bars for Mousseaumitchell, along with a year of probation, mandatory counselling, a weapons ban and no contact with the retail outlets from which he stole.

Senior is suggesting time served, saying Mousseaumitchell has taken steps in jail to overcome his addiction and turn his life around.

Mousseau-mitchell admitted he was nervous as he addressed the judge directly, apologizing for his actions, detailing his plan once he’s released and explaining that he wants to rebuild a relationship with his two children.

Judge David Orr is set to sentence Mousseau-mitchell Sept. 17.