Extremist’s appeal focuses on mental health
Terrorist wanted to blow up train bridge in Jordan Station
Chiheb Esseghaier spent months insisting he was sane. He did it in court, screaming through a tangled beard, spitting and pounding his chest.
“I am similar to the prophet Jesus and the prophet Joseph,” he howled once, explaining why he lashed out at a lawyer who suggested he might be ill. “I just throw the cup at his face because he is lying.”
Esseghaier, a Tunisian-born, Montreal-based PhD student, was convicted in 2015 of planning to blow a hole in an Ontario railway bridge. He also mused on tape about poisoning the food on a military base and setting off a volcano.
The railway bridge was in Jordan Station.
Court documents said that on Sept. 17, 2012, Esseghaier and his co-accused Raed Jaser drove to Jordan Station to scout the location where a train crosses a trestle bridge each day on its way from New York to Toronto. The police investigation was already underway at the time of the Jordan Station trip and Jaser’s North York home was under surveillance, although the accused men weren’t arrested until seven months later.
Four days after the Jordan Station visit, the RCMP obtained a warrant to surreptitiously enter the accused men’s homes and vehicles to acquire “maps, pamphlets, brochures” and other documents on “the Canadian railway system,” said the court documents.
The stealth operation enabled police to gather information on Jaser and Esseghaier without tipping off them or any associates of the ongoing police investigation
His arrest and conviction were hailed as landmarks in the Canadian battle against terrorism. But his case has since morphed into something much stranger and less morally clear.
According to multiple doctors, Esseghaier is severely mentally ill and almost certainly schizophrenic. He had long rejected that diagnosis. But in court documents filed last week, he revealed that he now agrees.
He is undergoing treatment in a British Columbia prison — including a regimen of anti-psychotic drugs — and is hoping to appeal his life sentence. “I believe I was unfit to stand trial,” he wrote in a document filed last Wednesday in the Ontario Court of Appeal.
Esseghaier’s treatment and appeal have thrust his story back into the public eye more than two years after the conclusion of his trial.
The particulars of his case are close to unique, according to legal experts. But they effectively boil down to this: Everyone involved, from the police, to the prosecutors and the judge, believed he was a fanatic, so no one noticed he was insane, at least not until it was too late. As a result, he went through his entire trial without several key questions — about criminal responsibility and fitness to stand — being tested. He was allowed to represent himself, and mount no real defence, even as he visibly unravelled in open court.
“I think we were all somewhat guilty of assuming he was saying things a radical Islamist would say,” said John Norris, who represented his co-accused, Jaser. As a result, few noticed that he was also exhibiting the telltale signs of an escalating mental disease.
Es seghaie rand J as er were arrested in 2013. Their bust was hailed as a major victory against terrorism, one that likely prevented hundreds of deaths. (Although the two were never anywhere close to consummating any plot.) The key witness in their trial was an undercover FBI agent who courted Esseghaier and nudged him toward revealing his plans.
The portrait that emerged of Esseghaier at trial was of a man who had let his life fall apart even as he grew more and more religiously devout. He was born in 1982, in Tunisia, and raised in a moderate Muslim family. He moved to Montreal in 2008 to pursue his PhD and soon devolved into extremism.
His newfound religious zeal dovetailed with a deteriorating personal life. He would spend hours in the washroom, but never seemed to bathe. He looked and smelled like a homeless person, according to one colleague. In recordings played in court, he rambled and seemed incapable of sustaining coherent thought.
Those are all cardinal symptoms of the early stages of schizophrenia, according to Dr. Hy Bloom, a forensic psychiatrist and expert on the intersection between mental health and Canadian criminal law. However, at his trial, Esseghaier’s mental health was effectively ignored, at least until after his verdict.
Ontario Superior Court Justice Michael Code allowed Esseghaier to represent himself and sat patiently through his long, often incoherent, rants on Qu’ranic law and other topics. Even as his behaviour grew worse — he regularly slept in court, was always dishevelled and occasionally spat at lawyers assigned to help him — his fitness wasn’t questioned.
Only after the verdict came down, during the sentencing phase, did Code, at the urging of an amicus curiae, or friend of the court, allow a psychiatrist to examine Esseghaier.
Dr. Lisa Ramshaw found Esseghaier to be actively delusional and likely schizophrenic. A second doctor, reviewing Ramshaw’s notes, concurred. But Code nonetheless sentenced him to life in prison.
Esseghaier, at the time, angrily denied any suggestion that he might not be sane. That, at least, appears to have changed. In a document filed last Wednesday, he informed the court that he was treated in prison with anti-psychotic medication, initially against his will, and now acknowledges that he has schizophrenia.
“When I originally filed my appeal, I said that I only wanted to appeal conviction. At the time I filed that notice, I was very ill,” he wrote. “I was suffering from delusions and believed that I would die, and my soul would ascend into heaven on Dec. 25, 2014. Because of this delusion, I did not believe that the life sentence imposed was real.”
At the heart of all of this is a tricky collision between mental illness, extremism and violence. It’s not unusual, Bloom said, for those suffering from the early stages of a disease like schizophrenia to turn to religion as a coping mechanism. There’s also a significant historical correlation between mental illness and lone wolf terrorism.
At the same time, it doesn’t necessary mean that, in Esseghaier’s case, his mental illness caused his extreme beliefs. (Indeed, he’s still arguing now, after treatment, that he should have been tried by the “Holy Quran.”) Nor does it mean that Esseghaier was necessarily unfit to stand trial, or not responsible for his actions, because of his illness.
The problem is that none of those issues were parsed out before trial. And because they weren’t, the whole process may have been tainted. It’s a question of fundamental justice. If someone is severely mentally ill, the courts need to at least consider that fact before trying them and sentencing them to decades behind bars.
That at least is what John Norris believes. He wants the Court of Appeal to order a new trial for both Esseghaier and his client. That would come at a cost, he believes. “But it’s a much greater cost to the administration of justice to allow for the possibility that an unfit person was put on trial.”
None of this is likely to be settled soon. A lawyer assisting Esseghaier believes the full appeal won’t be heard before the middle of 2018 at the earliest, three years after Esseghaier was convicted and five years after his arrest.
When police took Esseghaier into custody, in April 2013, he was effectively homeless. They arrested him outside a McDonald’s in Montreal’s Central Station. In pictures from that time, he’s always wearing a faded blue ski jacket over a healthy frame, the same jacket he would wear in court. Day after day, it grew baggier; his body faded away.