A NEWFOUNDLAND MAN WHO POSTED ANGRY TWEETS FOLLOWING A POLICE SHOOTING FOUND HIMSELF DETAINED AND LOCKED UP IN A MENTAL INSTITUTION. WAS THIS A CASE OF STIFLING POLITICAL DISSENT?
•A Newfoundland court has issued a ringing defence of political dissent after a man who sent a series of angry tweets about a police shooting was detained and locked up in a mental institution.
“If anger about political events and words of defiance to authorities are dealt with as signs of mental illness ... warranting involuntary committal, then our society is in a dangerous place,” said a ruling from the Newfoundland and Labrador Court of Appeal.
“Such anger and defiance are characteristic of political dissent. As the history of authoritarian societies has taught us, confinement in a mental institution is a particularly insidious way of stifling dissent, directly and through intimidation,” said the court, which included Justice Malcolm Rowe, who has since joined the Supreme Court of Canada.
Andrew Abbass posted several angry tweets following the fatal shooting of Don Dunphy in Mitchells Brook, N.L., by an RNC officer assigned to Premier Paul Davis’s protective detail.
“Executed just after Easter Sunday dinner with his daughter. She must be devastated,” read one, according to a story by The St. John’s Telegraph.
“#RNC claim that executing citizens outside their jurisdiction for Twitter misunderstandings is a standard practice,” read another.
Two days after the shooting Royal Newfoundland Constabulary officers went to his home. He was detained and taken to the psychiatric unit at Western Memorial Hospital in Corner Brook, N.L., on April 7, 2015.
At the hospital two physicians “completed the necessary paperwork that resulted in his involuntary admission,” according to the appeal court decision.
Abbass challenged his detention in provincial Supreme Court, claiming he was not suffering from a mental disorder and that the doctors’ certificates of involuntary admission did not cite grounds for his detention.
But the judge declined jurisdiction, and dismissed his application. Abbass was held for a week.
The appeal court questioned whether the confinement was a way of stifling dissent.
“Was this the intent of the police in this case? Did the physicians simply lend their authority to what the police asked them to do? Did they assume that a person who acts in the way Mr. Abbass did needs help and further assessment and observation, without turning their minds to the specific limited statutory criteria that would justify his deprivation of liberty?”
It added: “The reality is that if you are involuntarily confined, you are viewed differently; you are seen as less credible. That is not how it should be but that is how it is. As well, there is the intimidation factor. If the police can take you away once and the physicians confine you, maybe they will do so again.”