Ex-husband acquitted in stabbing found to be in state of ‘automatism’

VANCOUVER — A judge has acquitted a man of stabbing his partner with a kitchen knife, agreeing with defence arguments that the accused was in a drug and alcohol-induced state of “automatism” at the time.

Jean-Luc Perignon, now in his early 60s, admits to the April 2017 stabbing at the home he shared with his then-wife on the Sunshine Coast, but argued he should not be convicted of aggravated assault because he had consumed alcohol and powerful prescribed drugs, robbing him of voluntary thought or intention.

In his decision, Justice Warren Milman outlined Perignon’s difficulties with extreme pain from two separate motor vehicle accidents, leading to an opioid prescription described in the judgment as “dangerously high” and above a level that would be “fatal for someone naive to opioids.”

Perignon’s severe insomnia led to a prescription for the sedative zopiclone, which the judgment says can be linked to “activities, normally associated with wakefulness, that occur when the subject is in a sleeplike state.”

In the six days before the stabbing, Milman writes Perignon “experimented” with rapidly increasing doses and on the night of the attack, the opioids plus “three or four” alcoholic drinks wiped his memory of most events except “standing over his wife while she was lying on the floor in front of him, screaming in pain.”

In finding Perignon not guilty, Milman rejects Crown arguments that Perignon understood his actions by admitting immediately after the stabbing that he had “just done something really stupid.”