Bouchard-Lebrun pushed a man down some stairs, and stomped on his head several times. Bouchard-Lebrun argued that he had an underlying mental disorder that was triggered by the drug use, and therefore should be found not criminally responsible for the attack. A Quebec court found that whatever psychosis gripped Bouchard-Lebrun during the incident, it was “self-induced intoxication” and could not be used as an excuse for his actions.

On appeal, Bouchard-Lebrun argued the “self-induced intoxication” amounted to a “mental disorder” under the Criminal Code, but the Quebec Court of Appeal rejected his argument. It said in its 2010 ruling that the defense of mental disorder was not available to an accused suffering from psychosis induced by drug use in circumstances similar to those in Bouchard-Lebrun’s case.

Now the Supreme Court has dismissed the argument, saying Bouchard-Lebrun could not establish that he was suffering from an underlying mental disorder, since he returned to normal once the effects of the drugs ran their course. The court concluded:

“A malfunctioning of the mind that results exclusively from self-induced intoxication cannot be considered a disease of the mind in the legal sense, since it is not a product of the individual’s inherent psychological makeup,”

If everyone who committed a violent offense while in a toxic psychosis was found not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder, the judge said the scope of the defense would be too broad.

For the second time in a little over a year a murder has occurred at Clifton T. Perkins Hospital, a maximum security facility for the criminally insane located in Jessup Maryland.

Twenty four year old Vitaly Davydov from Montgomery County has been charged with murder in the beating death of his roommate 22 year old David Rico-Noyola from Anne Arundel County. Vitaly who suffers from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder had been at the facility ever since he fatally beat his psychiatrist in his Bethesda office in September of 2006.

In 2007 Vitally was found not criminally responsible for the killing because of severe mental illness and was ordered to the hospital until he was determined to no longer be a threat to anyone.

David had been at the hospital since August of 2008 after the Department of Mental Health and Hygiene labeled him incompetent to stand trial for the beating death of his mother 48 year old Ofelia Noyola – Monrroy. He had been scheduled for another competency hearing next month.

This story may have happened in America but it is still a stark reminder of the challenges faced when treating persons with severe cases of mental illness. Some may argue that treatment methods vary between facilities and the severity of the mental illness can differ greatly between individuals. Valid point in some cases maybe.

It would be interesting to have a dialogue with individuals dealing with the mental health community. Hearing their concerns, and comments in regards to areas that are lacking in the Canadian Mental Health establishment is a place to start.

The agreed statement of facts that was presented to the court. The Crown is not contesting any of the evidence:

-The Court heard Beaulieu’s family had been concerned about the Etienne deteriorating mental health for months.

-Beaulieu was seeing a psychiatrist and spent a few days in the hospital at the end of July, just days before he attacked his mother.

-On Aug. 4, 2010, Beaulieu was home alone with his mother at their Bissonnette St. home. Beaulieu hit his mother twice over the head with a baseball bat, then dragged her down a set of stairs. Etienne Beaulieu stabbed his mother in the neck and the stomach.

-The rest of Beaulieu’s family, his father and sister, returned to the house at 6 p.m. and discovered the horrific scene.

-Robitaille, a French immersion teacher at Prince of Wales Public School, died of her injuries at the Peterborough Regional Health Centre.

Local press has stated ”Beaulieu’s defense team has argued his mental illness was so severe he could not comprehend the repercussions of his act.”

The outcome of this hearing is a foregone conclusion. Decided long before the judge hands down the decision she is bound to deliver, Etienne Beaulieu will be found “not criminally responsible” in the killing his mother.

Dr. Gary Chaimowitz, a psychiatrist who examined Beaulieu in May, testified that Beaulieu was suffering from intense and aggravating delusions that day, and in his deteriorating mental state, Beaulieu believed another person was trapped inside the body he saw in front of him. Chaimowitz also testified Beaulieu had a “major psychiatric disorder”, but didn’t offer a formal diagnosis to the court. He testified Beaulieu could be suffering from schizophrenia. His symptoms included paranoid and bizarre delusions including the illusion that he was being persecuted.

The psychiatrist believed Beaulieu had suffered from these delusions for years before the attack. That Beaulieu was unable to distinguish right from wrong that day. “His disorder was so intense, so active, he could not appreciate the consequences of his actions,” Chaimowitz testified.

Chaimowitz testified that although Beaulieu’s state has improved since arrest, and he continues to improve each day, he does still pose a risk to the community. Chaimowitz then adds the risk could be managed with treatment, hospitalization and supervision.

As has been so often in the past, the only argument clearly heard in the Whitby courtroom is that a family struggling with the effects of mental illness sought help. And as so often is the case, it is only after disaster has struck, and life has been forever altered, that a psychiatric community offers a message of hope. “The risk can be managed with treatment” they say.

If that is true, then what types of intervention and care should have been implemented before August 4, 2010. Society needs to question why treatments were not successful. Isabelle Robitaille is dead. Her family torn apart. Etienne Beaulieu is not criminally responsible. The cost is immeasurable, and yet nobody pays.

And the crown sits quietly, patting themselves on the back for a job well done.

In 2004, North Battleford Queen’s Bench Justice Donald Krueger found Larose to be not criminally responsible for his actions because of a mental illness.According to evidence from a psychiatrist, Larose suffered from a chronic paranoid schizophrenic illness.

Doctors have determined that Larose no longer poses a threat and he has been slowly reintegrated back into society. Larose will have to report to a mental health worker and live in a group home.

The  Albertan teen killed her parents and younger brother when she was 12  but is a low risk for future violence and will be allowed to live in the community, a judge decided at her sentence review. The girl (JR) and her then-boyfriend Jeremy Steinke, who was 23,  murdered her parents and eight-year-old brother at the family’s Medicine Hat, Alta. home in 2006.

JR was found guilty of three counts of first degree murder. She was not declared “Not CriminallyResponsible” So why is she on Tim’s Law?

JR began her 10-year-sentence at a psychiatric hospital.

“The latest psychologist report shows the girl is cooperating fully with staff within the treatment program. The girl has displayed “exemplary behaviour. You are entering into a new phase in your program which is integration into the community. I’m sure it will not be particularly easy for you having been in a custodial setting,” Judge Brooker said Tuesday

At the end of the hearing J.R. spoke about her treatment. “I’m very grateful … it has really helped me to grow,” she said.

The Canadian judicial system like to protects killers. Killers like JR, Alan Schoenborn and Vincent Li. But who protects the public from killers like them?  Read more about “JR” here

In part the letter stated: “From testimony given over the last few weeks it is quite clear that Noyes was a threat to the community and a danger to children. Any layman can see that there was a clear history of violence and homicidal delusions, yet she was released back into the community over and over again. This woman knew she was ill”…. end quote

The woman found not criminally responsible in the murder of John Fulton will remain in a forensic psychiatric hospital for another year. Not because of the action of the local RCMP, the mental health workers, her psychiatrists, or her doctor. Rather through her counsel, Kimberly Noyes requested and consented to have her stay at the forensic psychiatric hospital in Port Coquitlam, B.C. extended and annual hearing postponed by another 12 months.

There were reports last year that Noyes was granted escorted leave from the hospital but the BC Review Board said that she has remained in detention at the hospital and has not had any escorted access to the community. As the Fulton letter stated “with a clear history of violence and homicidal delusions, she is released back into the community over and over again.

Kimberly Noyes knows she still ill and has delayed her own release.

The letter concluded This senseless crime was completely avoidable. Noyes’ actions were completely deplorable but mental health’s inactions are equally so.”Something don’t appear to change.

- March 2011. Maor Attar, 19, was found not criminally responsible after stabbing his sister Shirel 51 times and bashing her head with a hammer. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, he was sent to Philippe Pinel institute for an indefinite period.“I have been living dead now for two years,” he said in a letter to Quebec Superior Court “All my treasure is gone. All the time and energy I put into myself amounts to nothing.”

* Presently placed under psychiatric care at the Philippe Pinel Institute.

-February 2010. Martin Rondeau, 33, was found not guilty by reason of a mental disorder after killing 80-year-old Estelle Lauzon, a member of the Catholic order of the Sisters of Providence, while he was having an epileptic seizure. Experts determined that Rondeau was in a state of dissociation when he beat the nun to death while he was living at a convent on de Maisonneuve Blvd. E. The crown prosecutor said he could find no precedent where an accused has used epilepsy, successfully or otherwise, as a defence in a murder case.

*Martin Rondeau was freed after two-and-a-half years behind bars

- May 2007. Dave Narine was acquitted by reason of mental illness in death of his father. Narine told police that Jesus had given him a disease to protect his children and he was in direct communication with God. Dave Narine’s two children, a boy and a girl whose ages are between 7 and 10, had been living with their grandparents.

*Narine had a lengthy criminal record stretching back to 1993.

- September 2003. Mélanie Belanger was found not guilty after she stabbed her three-year-old daughter to death and tried to kill herself. A judge ruled Belanger was mentally unstable and severely depressed at the time.

*Name search returned no results for present status.

- December 2002. Omar Antonio Molina was found to be delusional when he killed Angela Mora, 68, who had taken him in at his parents request in an attempt to free him of his obsession with black magic. The St. Michel man, who believed he was Queen Victoria and Miss Hawaii 1969 in previous lives, stabbed Mora to death when he became convinced she was a witch.

*Name search returned no results for present status.

- December 2002. Philippe Gonzalez was acquitted after he killed his father Mariano at their Beaconsfield home. Psychiatric tests found Gonzalez, 28, was schizophrenic and obsessed about going to war. That night, he broke into the family’s weapons cabinet and took a rifle.

*Name search returned no results for present status.

- February 2002. Rachel Capra-Craig was found not guilty by reason of insanity after she killed her severely disabled daughter in deluded belief it was the only way to save the child from being molested by her father.  Capra-Craig, 54, was originally charged with first-degree murder, but psychiatrists found her to be delusional, paranoid and depressive when she fed the girl a lethal potion of ground-up pills.

*Name search returned no results for present status.

- April 2000. Ronald Larouche, 22, was found not criminally responsible because of mental problems in stabbing death of his landlord Yves Thibault in Saint-Etienne de Lauzon near Quebec City. After he killed Thibault, Larouche dragged his body into the living room, wrapped it in U.S. and Soviet flags, arranged the arms to form a cross, and placed beer bottles around it. Next to the body, a fur coat was arranged in the same way.

*Name search returned no results for present status.

- February 2000. Carole Robichaud was found not responsible in the strangling of her 18-month-old son, who was found dead in his bed, next to his teddy bear and covered by his favourite blanket. The 30-year-old Laval woman, whose husband left her for another woman before their son was born, was down to her last $5 after losing her job. A judge ruled that Robichaud had lost touch with reality, and everyone she looked saw signs she should kill herself.

*Name search returned no results for present status.

- December 1999. Calogero Caruso was found not criminally responsible for killing his father-in-law and wounding his mother-in-law. Psychiatrists testified that Caruso was under the delusion that his father-in-law, Rocco Recine, had placed a contract on his head, when he shot his in-laws on May 13 as he was dropping off his 20-month-old son to be babysat. In the days before, Caruso kept thinking he was being followed and would borrow his wife’s car because he was worried killers had planted a bomb under his own.

*Name search returned no results for present status.

- November 1999. Jean-Robert Lymontard was found not guilty by reason of mental illness in the slaying of his girlfriend, Jasmine Matthews in his Notre Dame de Grâce apartment. Psychiatrist Louis Morissette told the court that Lymontard, 39, suffered from psychosis for several years and the illness had escalated into paranoid schizophrenia on the July night Lymontard stabbed and choked Matthews to death.

*Name search returned no results for present status.

- April 1999. A man who vowed the devil made him kill his roommate at a Verdun home for psychiatric patients was found not criminally responsible. George Koussioulas stabbed a sleeping John Lipinsky 13 times last May and then immediately went to confess to his parish priest. Koussioulas told police afterward that voices kept telling him to kill Lipinsky before the roommate did the same to him. “According to him, the devil brought the voices and he, the devil, probably made him do it,’’ Justice Claire Barrette-Joncas wrote in her judgment. Koussioulas has had psychiatric problems for two decades and has been hospitalized 12 times during that period.

*Name search returned no results for present status.

- November 1997. Austin Wyse has been found not guilty by reason of insanity in the death of his maternal grandparents in Lachine the previous Christmas. The 26-year-old Wyse was sent to Philippe Pinel Institute since his arrest last Dec. 25. Psychiatrists for both the Crown and the defence, who saw Wyse in the days following the murder, testified that he is psychotic and delusional and sometimes believed that his grandparents were still alive.

*Name search returned no results for present status.

- October 1997. Quebec Court Judge Paul-Marcel Bellavance found 37-year-old Serge Roy not criminally responsible for his crimes after psychiatric evaluations determined he suffers from a number of mental problems, including severe depression.

Roy’s parents, Claude and Laurette Roy, and his 7-year-old daughter, Becky, were stabbed to death in their home in Saint-Elie-d’Orford in August 1996. Roy’s 10-year-old son, Kevin, survived by fleeing his grandparents’ house through a basement window.

*Name search returned no results for present status.

- March 1994. Luc Tourangeau, 28, who strangled his 4-year-old son with a towel in Chambly, has been found not criminally responsible by reason of insanity. Superior Court Judge Yves Mayrand recommended that Tourangeau be detained at the Philippe Pinel psychiatric institute. Psychiatrists for both the crown and defence said Tourangeau was not of sound mind and could not distinguish right from wrong when he committed his crime.

*Name search returned no results for present status.

- December 1993. Gordon Lamothe, 81, was found not guilty by reason of mental illness in strangling death of Emmanuella Corso, his wife of 60 years. A psychiatric report said Lamothe could not tell good from evil at the time. Lamothe told police he killed his wife because she begged him not to let her die after him.

*Name search returned no results for present status.

- March 1993. Manuel Rivas, a 58-year-old baker, was found not criminally responsible because of mental illness after he stabbed Eduardo Pacheco, 48, in the face and throat with a kitchen knife. The two men had worked side-by-side in the kitchen of the Montreal Children’s Hospital for more than 20 years. Rivas was sent to Philippe Pinel Institute in Montreal to undergo treatment for psychotic behaviour and severe paranoia.

*Name search returned no results for present status.

- January 1993. René Bilodeau was found not criminally responsible of second degree murder in slaying of his 71-year-old father. The Anjou man said he thought his father was Satan.

*Name search returned no results for present status.

- September 1989. Louis Pierre-Antoine, a 54-year-old taxi driver, was acquitted by reason of insanity after he killed his wife with a tire wrench because he thought she had put a voodoo curse on him was acquitted on a murder charge by reason of insanity. Pierre-Antoine said his wife Philomène had put a curse on him which affected his virility.

*Name search returned no results for present status.

- September 1988. Five years after she was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing a pregnant woman in a bid to take the fetus, Jocelyne Dupras Deschambault was acquitted of the murder by reason of insanity. Deschambault, 40, had offered Suzanne Lauzon, a 24-year-old stranger who was eight months pregnant, a ride home. When Deschambault’s husband arrived home that night, he found his wife lying nude in the bathtub, claiming she had given birth to the dead infant lying on her chest. Police found Lauzon’s body hidden under the stairs of Deschambault’s spotless home. She had been stabbed 48 times and had her eight-month fetus cut from her. During her first trial, a psychiatrist hired by the Crown, testified that the murder was a result of Deschambault’s temper tantrum following the younger woman’s rejecting a proposal to buy the baby.

*Name search returned no results for present status.

- June 1984. Harold Edwardson, 33, was found not guilty by reason of insanity after he shot his three-year-old daughter to death while having “evil visions.” Edwardson’s wife, who had returned to their Noyan home after a brief separation, managed to escape with their six-year-old son.

*Name search returned no results for present status.

Ms. Lafleur, 63, readily admitted she killed Ms. Napper, 61, in the Celina Street home they shared, telling a Durham homicide detective she’d been justified in doing so. Ms. Lafleur, who is schizophrenic, believed the victim was murdering children, court heard.

Ms. Lafleur believes she is a member of the royal family who was given permission to commit the murder by U.S. President Barack Obama, court heard. Addressing the court Tuesday, Ms. Lafleur insisted she had been granted indemnity in the killing.

“I was found innocent,” Ms. Lafleur, sitting in a wheelchair and breathing with the aid of an oxygen pump, declared. “I should be found innocent again.”

Prosecutor John Pollard and defence lawyer John Olver both recommended Ms. Lafleur be found not criminally responsible for the murder, and that the Ontario Review Board, which reviews the status of those declared NCR, determine how best to manage her in the future.

“We concede on the balance of probabilities that Ms. Lafleur did not know that what she was doing was wrong,” said Mr. Pollard, adding Ms. Lafleur’s illness “predisposed her to the act.”

Dr. Karen De Freitas, a forensic psychiatrist at Ontario Shores, said Ms. Lafleur continues to present a threat to others. “She remains psychotic and she remains a danger to the public,” she said.

Ms. Lafleur was ordered held at the Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences in Whitby until the Ontario Review Board rules on a future course of treatment for her.