MAGNOTTA MALINGERING, DOCTOR SAYS
Disorder — not disease — best explains his actions, expert witness argues
Luka Magnotta didn’t even have to bother malingering psychotic symptoms after his arrest, so eager was his German psychiatrist to believe him ill with schizophrenia, says an expert witness.
Dr. Gilles Chamberland, who was refused the chance to interview Magnotta but has reviewed the myriad of psychiatric reports on the 32-year-old, is testifying as an expert witness for the prosecution.
Of Magnotta’s performance for Dr. Thomas Barth in Berlin, where he was arrested in June 2012 for the killing and dismemberment of Lin Jun, Chamberland said dryly, “It’s hard for me to believe he could have done better than this — it’s a full picture.”
The cornucopia of symptoms Magnotta presented after being asked a single question by Barth ran the gamut from having “a radio in my head,” being forcefed steroids by a man named Robin and the urine and feces of another called Manny, claiming to feeling observed, jumping purportedly out of fear when Barth once reached for his phone, mentioning his schizophrenic father twice, dropping the name of his favourite anti-psychotic medicine and describing a litany of abuse by virtually everyone he knew.
“Mr. Magnotta didn’t have to malinger anything,” Chamberland said. “He had an interview (with Barth), he gave a list of symptoms, then withdrew to his room.”
At one point, discussing Barth’s report, Chamberland scoffed, “It’s a show … it’s not symptoms of psychosis or schizophrenia, it’s more of over-acting something.”
Since Magnotta is pleading not guilty by reason of mental disorder to five charges including firstdegree murder in Lin’s May 25, 2012, slaying, his mental health is the only real issue at trial. Through his lawyer, Luc Leclair, Magnotta long ago admitted the “physical part” of the charges.
Chamberland was called by prosecutor Louis Bouthillier to rebut the witnesses called by Leclair: a half-dozen doctors, including two expert forensic psychiatrists.
When an accused person is claiming to be not criminally responsible because of mental illness, the burden to prove he is or was so ill he didn’t know what he was doing at the time of the crime rests with his lawyer, in this case Leclair.
The two defence psychiatrists who interviewed Magnotta at great length both concluded he has schizophrenia and that at the time of the crime he was either in the grip of the disease or was suffering psychosis.
But if those doctors had the edge over Chamberland because they had face-to-face meetings with Magnotta, Chamberland may have an advantage of his own, in that he brings more of a dispassionate outsider’s eye to the case and to Magnotta.
(Interestingly, all three — Dr. Joel Watts and Dr. Marie-Frédérique Allard, for the defence, and Chamberland, for the pros- ecution — all work for the Institut Philippe-Pinel de Montréal, a secure forensic hospital.)
The legal question for the psychiatrists is: Was Magnotta capable of understanding what he was doing and knowing it was wrong when he slashed Lin’s throat, cut his body into 10 pieces and videoed much of the dismemberment, and posted the results to several online gore sites?
But the question underlying that seems to have been: Which better explains what he did — schizophrenia, a major mental illness best treated by anti-psychotic drugs, or a personality disorder, which is more difficult to treat and is, as its name implies, a disorder and not a disease?
Chamberland, in his two days thus far in the witness stand, has made a compelling case for the latter — that the theatrical man Quebec Superior Court Justice Guy Cournoyer and the jurors have seen ad nauseam in surveillance video on the night of the homicide, cool as a cucumber as he disposed of Lin’s body parts, is but the essence of the real Magnotta.
As Chamberland put it once, “You would have to work very hard to explain everything (Magnotta did) if you believe it’s schizophrenia.
“But with the other lens (a personality disorder), everything becomes clear — crystal clear.”
Personality disorders are bred in the bone, Chamberland said. “You are what your personality is. You have a personality disorder when what (you are) gets (you) into trouble.”
At bottom, he said, tiptoeing through the many psychiatric reports on Magnotta as he did, Magnotta showed himself to have been both careful and strategic with his doctors — and that points to his malingering, faking or exaggerating the symptoms he chose to report.
To some psychiatrists he confided that he was hearing voices; to others he denied even having a psychiatric history at all. To one, he lied even about his address and phone number; with others, he was overly voluble.
“Again,” Chamberland said several times, “this points to malingering, because he’s capable of filtering the information he puts out, or not.
“Usually, patients don’t have such strategies.”
And, when Magnotta did report psychotic symptoms, Chamberland said, they appeared to remain unaffected, undiminished, even by whopping doses of major anti-psychotic drugs.
“It’s clear,” he said, “that whatever medications you give him, the symptoms will remain because they’re not related to an illness.” Or as he put it another time, “Medication can’t change a personality.”
Even the defence psychiatrists saw at least some hints of a personality disorder in Magnotta, with one, Watts, diagnosing him as a histrionic as well as a schizophrenic.
One of Magnotta’s defining characteristics, Chamber- land suggested, was his overwhelming need for attention, typical of someone with a histrionic disorder. Even Magnotta’s “career” path — from stripper to porn actor to prostitute — speaks to that gnawing hunger for attention, even of the negative sort. Chamberland said his self-started mythical relationship with notorious felon Karla Homolka and the kitten-killing videos Magnotta made, both of which won him online buzz and threats, point to that.
Chamberland’s testimony will continue Monday, when the trial resumes.