Mental health experts parse reports
Phillip Tallio was an emotionally troubled teenager with a traumatic past before he was arrested, in April 1983, on the suspicion of having suffocated a 22-month-old girl in Bella Coola.
Tallio, then 17, was remanded in Vancouver provincial court for psychiatric assessment, and between the time he was charged and stood trial, the young man spent hours with mental health professionals. Their findings, as set out in hundreds of pages of material filed, differ substantially and became a key piece of Tallio’s 1983 guilty plea. Their reports have been filed with the court this year in connection with Tallio’s attempt to appeal his 34-year-old conviction.
Late last month, Judge Elizabeth Bennett of the B.C. Court of Appeal ruled Tallio’s appeal could go ahead, despite being more than 30 years past the filing deadline. In her reasons for the decision, Bennett said “the only evidence implicating Mr. Tallio at the time of his guilty plea was a statement that he purportedly gave to a psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Pos.”
Lawyers for the B.C. Ministry of Justice opposed Tallio’s attempt to proceed with an appeal. Bennett said in court: “The Crown submits it cannot respond to the challenge to Dr. Pos’ letter because Dr. Pos passed away before the appeal was filed. If a new trial was ordered, the Crown would have considerable difficulty mounting a case against Mr. Tallio.”
Pos, then the psychiatrist-inchief at the Forensic Psychiatric Institute in Port Coquitlam, asserted that he interviewed Tallio for more than an hour the month after young Delavina Mack’s murder, in order to determine his fitness to stand trial, according to a report written by Pos that was filed with the court as part of Tallio’s appeal.
Transcripts purporting to be from parts of that interview are included in a volume of affidavits and other court documents released last month after lawyers representing Postmedia News and the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network argued before Bennett in support of their release. The affidavits have not yet been tested in court and the Court of Appeal has not ruled on whether it will permit any of the new material into evidence on the appeal.
The Pos report indicates the accused made incriminating statements to the psychiatrist, such as: “I don’t understand why (they made it) first degree. … I didn’t think she died. … when I put a pillow on her head … it came out of the blue, I didn’t plan on the pillow doing this to her.”
In another part of his report, Pos indicates he asked Tallio about the crime, to which the young man responds: “I have a hard time thinking about it at all” and “I don’t know why I did it.”
No one else was present when Pos interviewed Tallio, according to the psychiatrist’s report, and the interview was not recorded, according to an affidavit by Deirdre Pothecary, who served as Crown counsel in the Tallio case.
In an affidavit filed with the court, Pothecary asserted: “In the 1980s, Dr. Pos was presented routinely by the Crown in B.C. as an expert witness. … At the time, I believe that Dr. Pos was regarded as having a ‘pro-Crown’ bias; however he was thought to be reputable.”
Before the 1983 trial, Phil Rankin, Tallio’s defence lawyer, hired Peggy Koopman, a registered psychologist and former professor at the University of B.C. to consult on the case.
She interviewed and tested Tallio for about six hours over three days in October 1983.
Among the topics they covered was the night the young victim died, according to an affidavit by Koopman.
“Although a high level of trust developed between us, he never acknowledged guilt in the offence, quite the contrary,” she wrote in her affidavit.
Koopman believed statements made in the Pos report indicate Tallio’s understanding of legal definitions were at odds with what she and other mental health professionals had found.
“In my clinical experience with Phillip, he did not understand the court proceedings, the differences between first and second degree murder, his plea or the consequences of that plea,” she wrote in her 2014 affidavit.
“In my discussions with Phillip Tallio, he thought that the sooner he went to prison the more likely it would be that he could go home for Christmas. He has now been in prison for more than 30 years.”
Also, Koopman found the “syntactical structures in the quotes attributed” to Tallio by Pos did not conform to her understanding of the teen’s linguistic pattern. And she said the leading questions that included highly emotional material that were put to Tallio would have left him with no strategy to answer Pos truthfully.
Tallio contends he never spoke to Pos at all, asserting in his affidavit that he remembers speaking with a female psychiatrist at the Forensic Psychiatric Institute, adding: “I do not recall ever being assessed by a male psychiatrist during this period. I have never been assessed by a ‘Dr. Robert Pos.’ ”
The Crown has said that position is not credible. Although there was no audio recording, Crown lawyers pointed out, there were written records of an interview.
Crown lawyers set out their opposition to Tallio’s request to appeal more than 30 years later in a memorandum they filed last month with the court, saying: “Dr. Pos may have had a reputation as having a Crown bias, which suggests that he was too quick to diagnose psychopathy in an offender, or would never identify a disease of the mind. But what (Tallio) suggests is that Dr. Pos fabricated in the form of an exact quotation (Tallio’s) words . ... To suggest that Dr. Pos had a form of ‘noble cause corruption,’ such that he would fabricate evidence is an incredible allegation against a professional who had nothing to gain.”
Documents filed this year with the court registry suggest Tallio’s lawyers may try to raise the conduct of Pos as part of an appeal.
His lawyers have filed unsworn opinion evidence in the form of
reports, written over the past five years, by four forensic psychiatrists who reviewed Pos’ 1983 work.
Dr. Roy O’Shaughnessy, head of UBC’s division of forensic psychiatry, expressed the opinion he “would certainly not interpret (Tallio’s comments in the Pos report) or the report as being any measure of self-incrimination or admission of guilt.”
Dr. John Bradford, a forensic psychiatrist and member of the Order of Canada, wrote: “In my opinion, none of this alleged verbatim response constitutes an ‘alleged confession.’ ”
Dr. Stanley Semrau, who also worked at the Forensic Psychiatric Institute, gave his opinion that “this report by Dr. Pos is one of most unusual and remarkable which I have ever encountered in my extensive career as a forensic psychiatrist.”
Several days into his 1983 trial, as lawyers for both sides prepared to battle over whether the statements to Pos should be admitted, Tallio entered a guilty plea. Pos was never called as a witness.
Now, material filed with the court suggests Tallio’s appeal lawyers may try to raise questions over how the plea came about.