National Post (National Edition)
Cosh on bogus defence,
THE COMPLACENCY OVER KEYSTONE IS SUFFOCATING. — REX MURPHY
On Wednesday morning, Ontario Superior Court Judge Anne Molloy convicted Yonge Street van attacker Alek Minassian of 10 counts of first-degree murder. I am reluctantly defying the judge's wishes in using and printing the murderer's name here. She has made a very thorough analysis of the facts before her, and her dismissal of the defence's ill-advised attempt to incorporate autism into an insanity defence is rightly crushing.
No expert witness in the case ever disputed that the killer had planned the attack or that achieving notoriety was his overwhelming motive in carrying out the mass murder. He correctly understood that his name would end up in the newspapers and other media because the general public would be horrified by his actions. He had concealed his plans from others, and carried on his ordinary life up to the eleventh hour in case he “chickened out” and had to abandon his intention to murder random strangers.
His behaviour, in other words, leaves no room whatsoever for the “not criminally responsible” defence. The killer unquestionably suffers from a mental disorder, autism, but he also has an above-average IQ, and every iota of his behaviour before the attack shows he “appreciated” the “nature and quality” of his act (i.e., that it was a mass murder). As for being capable of “knowing it was wrong” in the Criminal Code sense — which means “knowing that the ordinary moral standards” of reasonable people would regard it as wrong — the analysis does not really have to be any longer than “He explained at great length many times that the heinousness of the act was its entire purpose.”
The judge was not content to live with 20 words; her ruling is surely more like 20,000. But it's easy to see that she was in no position to split the difference. She has been clearer-sighted than some in the media, who fed a narrative that “incel ideology” — a brown streak of social media that justifies violence against women as revenge for celibacy and low social status — interacted with Minassian's emotional impairments to create a deadly automaton.
Minassian told copious lies to police about his involvement with online incels, and later admitted to a psychiatrist he had “made up” many of these facts to deflect culpability. “If I went out and killed people without any reason,” he is quoted as telling one shrink, “then I'm just an average mass killer. But if I say something on a large social network platform, then I tie myself into some other big-time names ... increase my fame and infamy regarding the killing.” He told a different doctor that he used incel material to “rev” himself up for the attack “even while recognizing that he was not himself a misogynist and that he did not have strong feelings of anger or rage towards women.”
He didn't at any point display empathy with either the women he had killed and injured, or the men either, but lack of empathy is no defence in itself to murder for pretty obvious reasons. Nor is the not-criminally-responsible defence a “but for” test. The experts and the judge all agree that it is likely that Minassian would never have killed anybody if he weren't autistic — in the same trivial sense that Charles Manson probably couldn't have built a hippie death cult if he hadn't learned to play guitar in prison.
It seems only the severity of Minassian's offence could excuse the prolonged entertaining of a patently bogus insanity defence. Near the conclusion of her ruling, Judge Molloy gives an obliterating analysis of the defence witness Dr. Alexander Westphal, the only person with any credential who was willing to say Minassian was not responsible.
He was able to do this by “deliberately refraining from educating himself on the Canadian (legal) test,” talking loads of nonsense as a result. When the judge overrode Westphal's objections to producing tapes of his interviews with the murderer, she found that he had suppressed inconvenient facts and failed in his (positive and explicit) legal duty to be impartial. She describes him as “adamant, perhaps even rigid” under cross-examination and characterizes his evidence as “rambling and often not responsive” to the Crown's questions. Makes you wonder why we would allow him into a courtroom, but maybe we'll stop doing that when word gets around.