Lengthy deliberations by jury set off alarms at Magnotta trial
We don’t know and never will what on earth is going on in that room at the Montreal courthouse where the Luka Magnotta jury is deliberating — six days now and rising — but anyone who says it doesn’t raise alarms about the criminal justice system is dreaming, or being dishonest.
Unlike some other highprofile cases, the jurors in this case saw and heard most of the evidence, and oh my it was considerable.
There was the revolting dis-memberment video Magnotta made and posted online of the sacrileges he committed upon the body of Li Jun, the gentle Chinese student he killed. There were the miles of surveillance video, showing Magnotta cheerily disposing of Lin’s remains and the bloody detritus of the homicide. He made 16 separate trips to the basement garbage room of his low-rent Montreal apartment building, he took out Lin’s torso in a suitcase to the street, he ran countless errands and cleared out his apartment and never, not once, did he forget to take care of his own appetites: He ordered in a pizza; he booked a flight to Paris; he primped and checked out his ass in the mirror in the building lobby.
So, the jurors saw all that and more and every single bit of it showed a careful, chill, self-possessed fellow, not someone in the throes of psychosis or delusion.
They missed out only on Magnotta’s notorious catkilling videos, his audition tape for a plastic surgery show, during which he could barely contain his delight in himself, and the online promos he appears to have made in advance of Lin’s killing, but they had surely ought to have had a good sense of the man.
The case against Magnotta was simply overwhelming.
It is surely no coincidence that on the first day of trial, Magnotta’s lawyer, Luc Leclair, told the jurors that his client admitted the “physical part” of all five charges he faces, but was pleading not guilty by reason of mental disorder.
A regular not-guilty plea wouldn’t have been worth the breath it took to say it. That jury would have been out for five minutes.
Magnotta’s mental health was the only issue for these jurors, from the get-go, and it’s surely the one with which they are now wrestling. And there’s the rub. The jurors heard weeks of expert psychiatric evidence.
In a nutshell, it amounted to this: Magnotta’s father is a genuine schizophrenic, Magnotta was hurriedly diagnosed with schizophrenia himself as a young man, and the label stuck, as doctor and psychiatrist alike repeated the diagnosis despite the fact that for the most part, they didn’t see the symptoms of the disease in Magnotta.
(There was an episode of the old Seinfeld series which perfectly captured this phenomenon. Elaine was caught reading her own medical chart by her doctor, who promptly made a note in it, undoubtedly to the effect that she was a high-maintenance whack job, as indeed she was. Thereafter, she couldn’t get another doctor to accept her as a patient because the first physician’s note followed her around like a bad smell.)
As for why a young man would fake such an illness, the answer was clear: Magnotta never much had to bother with a real job, being on a government disability allowance most of his life, which he supplemented with income from prostitution.
Mostly, he was an attention junkie, and being able to lie on a supposed bed of pain from time to time would have neatly met that need.
All of Magnotta’s medical records were entered into evidence.
There were a ton of them. Leclair called four psychiatrists in total — two who had treated or were treating his client, two forensic experts who did formal assessments. Jurors heard endless earnest testimony about psychosis, schizophrenia, psychotic breaks, hallucinations, delusions, command voices.
The effect was to obfuscate and confuse.
“Magnotta’s mental health was the only issue for these jurors.”
Prosecutor Louis Bouthillier did a magnificent job in his closing argument to remind the jurors of the fundamental simplicity of the case, as did his expert witness Dr. Gilles Chamberland, but it may have been too little, too late.
As I wrote someone recently, the psychiatric witness (I exempt Chamberland from this, as he testified with uncommon clarity and sense) is akin to the mythical Wampus bird, a creature my late father taught me about: He is a witness who flies at ever-increasing speeds, in ever-decreasing circles, until he finally disappears up his own a--hole, from which point of vantage he laughs gleefully at his baffled pursuers.
These jurors may be those baffled pursuers.
Not-criminally-responsible is a verdict which is not without honour or purpose. I believe in it.
I’ve defended it in other cases (most recently the case of Richard Kachkar, who stole a snow plow, then struck and killed Toronto police Sgt. Ryan Russell with it), and expect I will again. Those so seriously mentally ill they don’t know what they’re doing aren’t responsible and don’t belong in prison.
But neither should NCR be used as a way out for those who are clearly not normal — i.e., Magnotta — but whose illness doesn’t preclude them from appreciating and knowing the wrongfulness of their acts (i.e., Magnotta). For NCR to be used as a Hail Mary pass in cases where there’s no other defence diminishes the genuine cases.
The last time I saw a jury take this long to find its way to a verdict was the trial of Francis Carl Roy, who was, finally, after six days of deliberation in 1999, convicted of first-degree murder in the slaying of Alison Parrott.
In that case, much of the most damning and relevant evidence against Roy had been kept from the jurors — all for perfectly good legal reasons.
His defence was really his explanation for how his DNA was found in Alison: Hell yes, he’d stuck a curious finger into the dead body of an 11-year-old girl, but he was no rapist or killer. He was both, of course.
This time, the jurors had most of the damning evidence, but then heard so much expert testimony about how to interpret it they may have lost the ability to trust their own eyes. Postmedia News