Nothing unusual up my way about folks carrying a hunting knife, for a lot of people hunt. Grandmothers hunt. (I don’t hunt, but even then I have a diving knife attached to my PFD, and the PFD is usually either in my vehicle or on me.) If I came upon someone out and about with a hunting knife, I wouldn’t give it a second thought, unless they appeared unstable.
Do I think that the headhunter carried the knife for the purpose of killing someone? Yes. Would I charge him wtih 1st degree murder? No, for my supposition is a far cry from proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Better to charge him with something that has a substantially similar maximum sentence while at the same time having a better chance at conviction.
You know, the guy is obviously so incredibly messed-up that I can’t find it in my heart to hate him for what he did. If anybody qualified for an insanity plea, I think it’s this guy, although it seems like keeping him alive in an institution is no kindness (not that he’d be killed in jail, either, since we don’t have the death penalty here).
From the article that Northern Piper posted: “Police are looking into information that Li may have spent as many as four days in a psychiatric facility prior to the attack, Dalmyn said.”
This may be just a rumor that they’re chasing down, but I would SO not want to be connected with any facility that had discharged him or turned him away.
They may not have been able to hold him any longer, if it was an involuntary confinement. I don’t know the law in Canada, right now, but in the US it’s very hard to hold someone beyond 96 hours against their will, without clear evidence of a threat.
I wouldn’t want to be connected, either. But that’s simply because I am allergic to witch hunts. I’m sure that there are teams of lawyers trying to find paperwork to prove that every i is dotted and t is crossed, but I’m not going to assume that the facility erred, based on what they knew at the time.
OtakuLoki, I wasn’t trying to imply that they did anything wrong. Just that it would be horrible finding out and having to think about it; and that, if not a witch hunt, something was coming and it was very likely to hit a fan.
Fair enough Yllaria. There are enough misapprehensions about mental health and its treatment that I figured it would be useful to use your comment to emphasize that this event could have happened in spite of the treatment facility doing everything it could do legally to treat this guy.
I understand that people can’t be held at mental institutions against their will in Canada, either. Put that together with the sorry state of available mental health facilities in Alberta, and you might have a big problem.
