Crooked in Canada

The animal that cut off Tim McLean’s head and then ate his flesh on a Greyhound bus will find out in March whether or not he can be held criminally responsible for his actions, a decision that will be made by forensic psychiatrists but not necessarily supported by the Manitoba judge who will be on the bench during the three-day trial.

I hope for the victim’s family’s sake the three forensic psychiatrists and the judge don’t follow the same logic as their counterparts did in Alberta when the killer of Steven Tavares, a man who tricked his way into a sleeping Tavares’s room and stabbed him 28 times wasn’t held criminally responsible for his actions. If that happens Li will likely be back on the streets of Canada in about three years time.

Of course there are differences between the two murder cases, the first one being that by all appearances Li acted on the spur of the moment, whereas Stephane Gaetan Lee formulated a plan as to how he was going to gain access into his victim’s room so that he could stab him to death. Coincidentally, their names are pronounced in the same way. Weird or what?

Li snapped. Lee didn’t. Lee was charged with first-degree murder while Li is charged with second-degree murder.

Both obviously have mental health issues, probably have had them for most of their lives, and yet neither of them killed anybody before they committed their dastardly deeds.

Li was a 40-year-old drifter before he took McLean’s life, while Lee was twenty-three before he took Tavares’s life.

McLean’s mother is hoping that Li never walks the streets again, while Tavares’s mother expected same but was horribly disappointed when Justice Peter Martin decided that the assessments submitted to the court by doctors George Duska, Liya Xie, and David Tano were good enough for him to conclude that Lee couldn’t be held criminally responsible for his actions because of Lee’s paranoia.

Funny, I’m paranoid and delusional sometimes, but I have never murdered anybody, at least not yet anyway, and I’m forty-seven.

Hmm…Ya think if I did have a brain snap and did kill somebody that I could trick forensic psychiatrists into believing I was paranoid and delusional?

I bet I could, in fact I bet anybody who is facing a life time in prison could trick those who hold their fate in their hands into believing or assuming anything. Just because one is a forensic psychiatrist doesn’t mean that he or she can’t be tricked.

What do you think, am I right or what?

Funny how both of these killers managed to make it through life without having a brain snap and killing somebody before, and then poof two people wind up dead.

According to my way of thinking (rational, logical or not), I would have to conclude that both men knew the difference between right and wrong, and that killing somebody wasn’t worth being locked up for the rest of their lives, at not least until Li and Lee decided to kill somebody.

In my book that makes them sane enough to be held criminally responsible for their crimes, though I will admit that I am more inclined to believe that Li is, and was, more f**ked up than Lee when he ended McLeans life without having to trick his way onto the bus. I doubt there was any premeditation on his part, and that it was a schizophrenic moment that drove him to his madness, and if he were found not criminally responsible for his actions I would expect that at the very least he spent the rest of his day locked up in a mental institution, which should have been the case when Lee was found not criminally responsible by Justice Peter Martin for the murder he committed.

Interesting sidebar about Lee’s trial; did you know that Lee’s mother took a vacation in New Zealand at the time her son was to stand to trial? I don’t if the trial was delayed because of her vacation or not, but taking a vacation while your son is on trial for murder doesn’t say much about the mother does it?

Lee was a calculating and cunning when he committed his crime, the proof in the fact that he took the time to trick hotel security into letting him into his victim’s room instead of kicking down the door before he stabbed his sleeping victim 28 times. Li was not; at least I don’t think he was. It sounds to me like Li just totally lost it, whereas Lee rationally planned how he was going to get even with Tavares’s, his co-worker at Nexxa Industry with whom he had a fight with earlier, a fight broken up by other co-workers.

Another coincidence between the two murders is that both victims were sleeping when they were murdered. They weren’t a threat to anybody.

If both of these killers are as mentally imbalanced as they and the psychiatrists will have us, or want us to believe, then how come Li and Lee able to make it through life without killing somebody before they committed their heinous crimes?  What preventing them from killing somebody before, common sense and the awareness that murdering somebody was wrong. I find it hard to believe that two men, who managed to go through life without killing anybody, or causing harm to somebody else, couldn’t be found criminally responsible for their murderous acts.

Brain snap or not Lee knew what he did was wrong, that’s why he fled to Calgary to tell his mother and sister what a terrible thing he had done. That action alone should be proof enough to anybody, forensic psychiatrist or not, that Lee knew what he was doing all along, from tricking hotel security into letting him into Tavares’s room to returning to Calgary immediately after to tell his family what he had done.  Call me mad, but it if Lee was sane enough to do that, he was definitely sane enough to be held criminally responsible for his actions.

As for Li, if I was Tim McLean’s mother I wouldn’t hold my breathe expecting her son’s killer to be found criminally responsible for his actions, but I would certainly expect Li to be locked up for the rest of his life in a mental health institution somewhere in Canada if not Manitoba, unless of course there’s a clone of Justice Peter Martin sitting on the bench, and cloned Alberta mental health authorities in that institution treating the man who butchered her son.

I hope for Mrs. McLean’s sake the latter isn’t the case, but given the similarities between the two murderers and the murders, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Li is walking streets in Canada three years from next March.  If that happens Canadians should be up in arms and demanding that changes to the mental health act as it applies to murderers be changed immediately, not that those changes shouldn’t be happening now.

Petition for new legislation for those found not criminally responsible for their actions

Players in the Stephen Tavares Murder Case…
Court Dispositon
Killer on the Street: Email from Victim’s Mother
Justice Peter Martin failed Steven Tavares
Stephan Gaetan Lee: A Cold-Blooded Killer