My mistake. I thought I remembered going thru a RCMP checkpoint before getting to the US one last year, but my wife informs me that we didn’t.
Weirddave, even if you had, it is a wife’s sworn duty to tell the husband he is mistaken, no matter which side of a position he is on. 
scuse me? where do you get the criminal record? He’ll no doubt have one soon. but at the time? He was due in court, but that info was not known. he didn’t have any wants or warrents out. he was strange, weird, freaky, suspicious, but none of that was illegal. Nor was, apparently all the other stuff that you keep on mentioning.
once again I ask you - how long should a citizen be detained merely 'cause they look odd, have an odd assortment of legal stuff in their possession. You can be questioned for a time. He was. But if you want to hold him for any serious length of time, you need criminal charges to be brought. “he musta done something” isn’t enough.
they confiscated his (legal) possessions, apparently. they held him for several hours while they checked wants and warrents. They had suspicions of him, certainly, but w/o an actual crime, they would have to let him go.
The warrant was ready at 10:00am, was was either a half-hour before or after Despres cleared the border, depending on who you ask.
According to Ahern, the RCMP said they couldn’t act at that time, because there was no warrant yet. Everyone concerned had to know damned well that he didn’t intend to make his court appearance.
They had legal grounds to arrest him for lying to border security. That is an actual crime.
Even without taking the step of actually arresting him, they could have (and should have) legally held him for longer than they did. Consensual conversation. As long as they had pertinent questions for him, and he was free to return to Canada, no worries.
A federal peace officer has the authority to order a psychological evaluation if they have probable cause to believe that someone is mentally ill and likely to cause harm to themselves or another. Despres easily met that criteria. He was observably mentally unwell, armed and armoured as for battle, and he had a chainsaw, flak jacket, and hoodie that appeared to be stained with blood.
They had several options available to them. The claim that their hands were tied or that they had no reasonable reason to further detain him is patently false.
Even if the double homicide didn’t take place, they had ample opportunity to thwart a fugitive from justice, which they didn’t take. Through that neglect, they put Americans at risk. They fucked up.
Lied to border cops. Man was delusional. that, too, is not a crime. (yes, lying is, but rants of a delusional person aren’t routinely prosecuted FME)
So your now saying the US authorities had actually spoken w/the Canadian authories, even about the not showing up for court thing? then my answer is: If the Canadian Authorities had wanted him detained, they should have told the US authorities, “hold him, we’ll be there in a second”. At the time it would appear to me that the Canadian authorities who had the most significant info at the time weren’t all that concerned about him leaving their jurisdiction. Perhaps in hindsight, not their finest hour. But not the responsability of the US guards.
Surely you’re not suggesting the CA authorities told the US folks “a warrent will be issued w/in hours, HOLD HIM!” and the US authorities did nothing? Seems unlikely to me, too that the comment about “warrent will be issued w/in hours” was made since the US folks were looking for warrents, and most likely then would have dallied a bit longer if they’d known it was only a matter of hours.
They could have approached it from either angle. Either he lied, and could be arrested for that crime, or he was delusional and equipped with weapons, zip-cuffs, and kevlar, and could be held for observation.
So far, we have only a U.S. Border Security spokesperson’s account of the exchange. As I have said, (and already repeated once,) if the RCMP shrugged it off and gave the impression they had no interest in Despres, they should get a fair amount of the shit. If there was a communication failure, people should be held to account on both sides of the border. I’m sure we’ll get more detail on the specifics of the exchange as this develops.
U.S. Customs isn’t primarily there to do favours for Canadian law enforcement, though. Their responsibility is to the American public – and they dropped the ball.
They took away his weapons. even though they were apparently legal for him to possess. they detained and questioned him for a couple of hours. They did what was reasonable. It’s not illegal to be delusional. by taking his weapons, they eliminated a potential threat.
wrt: only our side’s version of call. they were looking for a reason to hold him. Do you really believe that if the Canadian authorities had wanted him held and expressed it, the US folks would have shrugged it off? I don’t. We have evidence the US folks wanted to hold him. They did hold him. They made calls and checks. they did not find any legal justification for holding him further, therefore they are required to let him go.
- absolutely. and the public in this case, included Despres.
Maybe they delayed it, but they certainly didn’t eliminate it. A delusional person with a history of assault was still walking around. They didn’t eliminate his delusion or disposition, and there are plenty of other pointing things in the United States, which it is reasonable to assume that he would set about acquiring. At the very least, he needed help. If I were in a delusional state (believing I was a U.S. Marine, ‘worked for George Bush’ and (according to one witness, anyway,) an assassin,) I would want that help, even if I didn’t know it. Shrugging that off was not a service to Despres.
According to Ahern, the RCMP said that there was nothing that they could do until later in the day, when the warrant came through. Of course they would prefer to have him in custody – that’s axiomatic. At the time of the exchange, there was nothing that they could do. However, there were several things that U.S. Customs could have done to hold him – all well within their purvue. If they were looking for a reason to hold him, they didn’t require anything further from the RCMP.
Not finding (or exercising) legal justification to hold him is not the same thing as not having legal justification to hold him. They had plenty of justification. They just didn’t use it.
Oh, by the way:
A U.S. Customs spokesperson said that they took his weapons away because he failed to declare them. If he had declared them, they wouldn’t have taken them away, either.
again - there’s a limit to how long some one can be legitimately detained w/o a criminal charge. and now you seem to be saying that it wasn’t just a matter of moments before the CA authorities could do anything? so how the fuck is it the US authorities responsabilities to act on their behalf? They did as much as they could w/o risking a custodial situation w/o a legitimate reason.
what. the. fuck. ?. "not finding (or exercising - if you don’t find it how can you exercise it?) legal justification to hold him is not the same as not having legal justification to hold him? jaysus. You keep saying they had legal justification. Where? He was in possession of legal items. He seemed delusional (also not illegal). no wants/warrents were on him. they had no charge on him. Canadian Authorities apparently had some vague interest in him, but did not have a warrent either. It was a US citizen on US soil. He had rights.
they had suspicions of him. but no fucking crime. later they found the crime, sure. but at the time, under what law, authority did they have to detain him further?
Where did I say that? As I said before, it seems as though there may have been some communication problems. They didn’t have a warrant for him at that time – but they knew that there would be one shortly. (Within an hour, as it turned out.) He was in the process of bailing on court hearing.
Yes, that’s right. I do. Because they did. They could have arrested him for supplying false information, or misrepresenting himself. A perfectly legitimate charge, which would have legally kept him in custody. They could have ordered a psych eval. They probably should have ordered a psych eval. It’s common sense that a delusional person who’s armed themselves, is wearing kevlar armour, and carrying zip-cuffs represents a danger to others. That’s not just “looking strange.” It’s very common for police to hold people on relatively trivial (but legitimate) charges, if it looks like they may try to run. This guy was manifestly on the run.
If they didn’t want to actually take custody of him, and they were able to ascertain when the warrant would be ready, they could have simply talked to him for another half-hour. No one would have fucking blinked if he was there for three hours, under the circumstances. Of course there are legal limits on how long someone can be detained without charges – but two hours is not approaching that limit. I’ve known many people who’ve been held up considerably longer, some of whom were U.S. citizens going back home from Canada. Sometimes the reason for their delay was based on old possession charges – sometimes it was simply that they “looked strange.” (Dreadlock deadlock.)
If you don’t think these three options are legal or practical means that they could or should have kept him in custody, explain why.
By choosing not to exercise these options, which were within their authority, they chose to let a delusional person with violence tendancies walk free, when they had reason to believe that he was dangerous.
As for “if you don’t find legal justification, how can you exercise it?” I think it’s reasonable to believe that they were aware of these options.
More information. (Still from U.S. officials on the defensive.)
The warrant was issued fifteen minutes before Despres was released.
Still, I have to admit that that probably didn’t matter, if what a Canadian prosecutor quoted in the CNN article says is true:
This confuses me a little bit, though, because I was under the impression that an assault with a deadly weapon was an indictable (Americans read “felony”) offense. If he really was charged with a summary conviction (read “misdemeanor”) offense, and the RCMP were prepared to let him skip out on it, then that changes things considerably.
If they were told that he was just supposed to appear for some pissant charges that nobody was going to sweat over too much, (“That guy? Brother, you can have him!”) then the steps that they could have legally taken to keep him in custody would have been pointless, because the crazy bastard would have still ended up on the streets in the U.S., just a little later. So why bother?
Presumably, a “delusional person with a history of assault” is his default state of being, right? So why wasn’t he arrested and thrown in jail at random months ago, if that’s a crime?
Why were the border guards required to arrest him for this non-crime when police in his jurisdiction weren’t months ago, if the only requirement was “delusional person with a history of assault”?
that’s pretty much what I was assuming - as far as the CA authorities would have felt at the time "so he skipped out on a minor charge, he’s out of our jurisdiction/ hair - not only let him go but by all means **you guys ** keep 'im. " It’s only in hindsight that this loon was seen as any real danger.
No. Not talking about arresting someone for a crime, here. I still think that it would have been in the public interest to have a psych evaluation ordered on the guy. He wasn’t just “A delusional person with a history of violent assault” He was a delusional person with a history of assault whose delusion was that he was a government assassin, and who was walking around with a small arsenal, restraint cuffs, combat armour, and a bloody chainsaw.
Taken together, these easily meet the criterion of “reasonably believed to pose a threat to self or others.”
If you’re psychotic, things that may not be illegal in-and-of themselves are (quite sensibly) grounds for holding you for observation, for your protection and that of those around you. If you’re having an episode an you end up on the subway, clutching a claw hammer to your chest while looking fearfully at everyone who passes and muttering about how they’re aliens, you can be picked up. It’s not illegal to possess a hammer, it’s not illegal to believe that aliens walk amongst us in the guise of humans, and it’s not even illegal to be afraid of people. But taken together, it’s reasonable to believe that without intervention, someone’s going to get hurt. And so the law allows for that intervention. It’s common sense.
Someone who believes that they’re a trained killer for the NSA and boasts about their high kill-rate while carrying bloody weapons? Yeah, they can be taken off the street for a while to determine if they are a threat to themselves or anyone else.
If you’re a harmless psychotic who believes you’re in contact with superintelligent lifeforms from the Nonoxynol-9 system, and you spend your time in a public park playing tea-time with plastic dolls whom you believe are the anchors of the major networks, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a violent history – because there’s no reason to think that you might hurt anyone if you carry on the way you are. Not so if you’ve armed yourself to the teeth, are carrying zip-cuffs and wearing armour, and sincerely believe you’ve a license to kill.
He could (and in my opinion should) have been held for psychiatric evaluation, based on the circumstances.
I can sympathize with the guards’ reluctance to exercise their authority to do that, though, since so many people apparently feel that it would be wrong to intervene in any way unless he could be shown to actually attack someone.
The law is commonsensical, but people are often not. Why take the trouble? If he does follow through on his delusion that he’s an assassin, that’s somebody else’s problem.
At the risk of turning this into a nationalistic squabble, something that often appears strange to an outsider about American political philosophy is a tendency to support ideal principles in a totally absolute way, and react very severely to any exception or dilution, no matter how sensible they may seem. It’s a sort of slippery-slopism. For example, there’s a lot of criticism of Canada’s hate speech laws because they place some limitation on what you can legally broadcast or publish. It doesn’t matter that the only check on the Charter right to free speech that it imposes is that you can’t give a speech, broadcast, or print anything that says “People of [a particular ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation] should be beaten or killed.]” You can’t advocate genocide or try to start a race riot. You can’t publicy promote hate against a specific group, unless you are arguing a religious point, are telling a simple truth, or have reason to believe that you’re telling the truth. Still, if you Google for “Canada Hate Speech,” most returns are Americans tsk-tsking about how he live under the insufferable yoke of censorship and how this is a terrible law that horribly abridges our rights. We don’t miss the right to publish flyers that say “Burn all Packis!” It’s a common sense thing, and is crafted with the general welfare of all Canadians in mind.
With the Despres thing, I see a lot of the same kind of reasoning. “He’s got a right to carry swords, knives, and brass knuckles!” I think the germ of that sentiment is “I’ve got a right to own a gun!” Well, of course. It is possible to react to things in context. People seem to react as though it’s impossible (or undesirable) to make common sense exceptions. Just because someone who thinks they’re a working commando and has little or no grasp on reality can get yanked off the street without committing a crime and kept away from pointy things if it’s deemed appropriate doesn’t mean an intolerable abridgement of rights is taking place. Everyone else has the right not to get stabbed in the eye by someone who thinks they’re a Syrian spy.
Anyway, blah blah blah.
wring, that seems like a pretty reasonable assumption.
Larry, are you sure it was a charge of assault with a weapon? All of the news articles I’ve looked at say he was just charged with assault. (See this Globe & Mail article.) It’s true that he pulled a knife while making the threat, but he didn’t actually use it. The police may have decided in the circumstances that the appropriate course was to charge with simple assault and uttering threats.
In any event, all three of these offences are hybrid, meaning that they could be tried either summarily or by indictment. (See the Criminal Code, ss. 264.1(2); 266; 267).
The process starts the same way in every case, with the police laying an information. When it goes to court, the Crown prosecutor decides whether to proceed summarily, or by indictment. The Crown takes into account factors like the accused’s record and the actual facts. Here, where there was no actual physical contact, or physical harm to the victim, the Crown may have decided to proceed summarily.
I was under the impression that it was an automatic thing.
I see what you mean about the hybrid offense thing, though.
At any rate, I’m satisfied that his pending charges weren’t necessarily something that the RCMP were going to be scrambling over.
At the very least, the border gaurds should have asked to see his military ID, and asked for his unit then called to verify he was who he said he was. If he was proven to be a liar at that point, he should have been detained for his own safety and the safety of others. (Not to mention charged with lying to officers and falsely representing himself to be a marine etc.) He should have had a psychiatric evaluation to be sure he wasn’t on the verge of a killing spree. Someone misrepresenting themselves to be military personnel, carrying weapons, (one of which is illegal in the country he’s leaving) armor and zip cuffs, IMO is a threat to the safety of others. Aren’t border gaurds given a list of items that are illegal in Canada, so they can better identify and detain suspicious persons at least long enough to verify that they aren’t a threat? If not, they should be.
They can only concern themselves with U.S. law. By the time he was talking to them, his brass knuckles were legal. Knowing that he committed a crime in Canada by walking around with them doesn’t matter. The most they could do was ask him to voluntarily walk back across the line and turn himself in for it.
It does seem that (unless they were under the impression the Canadian authorities were expiditing warrants and extradition paperwork) the only real option they had was having him held for psychiatric evaluation.
The police have discretion in what charges to lay, depending on the circumstances of the case. They don’t have to charge the maximum, if they think a lesser offence is more appropriate. As well, even if the police do charge the maximum, it’s always open to the Crown to substitute a lesser charge, if they think it more appropriate, or if there are evidential problems with proving the greater charge.
I’ve been thinking about this suggestion while doing some yard work, and I’m not convinced that it was there. I don’t know what the relevant US laws would be, so I’m going by comparison to the Canadian laws on the topic. Assuming the laws of the two countries are reasonably similar, I’m not convinced that there was grounds for a psych evaluation.
First, a general comment. Our laws that relate to individual liberty are usually designed to favour the liberty of the individual. Public safety only trumps individual liberty on clear and convincing grounds. If the scales are evenly balanced, the laws direct a decision in favour of individual liberty.
In Canada, there are two types of psych evaluations - one done under the authority of the criminal law, and one under the civil law. The criminal law only allows for an evaluation when someone has done something that looks like a criminal act, but there are doubts about the individual’s mental capacity to stand trial (i.e. - may not appreciate the nature of the trial and may not be able to instruct counsel adequately). It’s triggered by the laying of charges against the individual. No charges, no possibility of a criminal psych evaluation.
That option wouldn’t be available here, because the customs guards had no reason to believe that he had committed an offence under U.S. law, other than the odd statements he made. They seem to have concluded that those statements, taken together, were not sufficient to warrant charges. If so, a criminal psych evaluation wouldn’t be available, since charges are a prerequisate.
That leaves the civil process for a committal and evaluation. But really, was there enough there? You need evidence to present to a judge that the individual poses a clear risk to the safety of himself or others. Making bizarre statements, no matter how odd, is not sufficient to meet this standard. You can go to the corner of Yonge & Bloore, or Times Square, and find bizarre characters - they’re a dime a dozen, it sometimes seems, spouting off on God alone knows what. Even saying that you’re a government agent, or a trained assasin, probably doesn’t reach the sufficient standard for civil committment. The question isn’t whether you’re nutty as a fruitcake - it’s whether your nuttiness is likely to harm yourself or someone else.
They took his pointy toys away from him, reducing any risk he might pose. I’m not sure that a judge would see enough for a civil committment.