Legal Issues and Mental Illness
Chapter 5
Issue: Not Criminally Responsible
Reporters and editors should look more deeply into criminality, guilt and NCR verdicts before they become caught up in a fast-breaking and emotive case that may require quick decisions.
Chris Summerville, Sarah Berry, Dr. Phil Klassen & The Hon. Justice Richard Schneider
UPDATES
Police Bulletins: A person who has been found not criminally responsible for an offence, in the later stages of treatment and rehabilitation, may be released from hospital on day passes. Occasionally the patient does not return on time and police may issue bulletins warning of potential danger. In the great majority of such cases, the patient returns without incident. News organizations that reported the original bulletin should also report the uneventful return, to allay public fears and avoid increasing stigma.
RESOURCES
The case of Vincent Li, who beheaded Tim McLean on a Greyhound bus in Manitoba in 2008, generated widespread horror at the time. Li's schizophrenia had been undiagnosed and untreated. Mr. Li was found not criminally responsible, detained in hospital for treatment, and eventually released under supervision. He has not re-offended. CBC’s Karen Pauls covered his murder trial in Winnipeg. She told Mindset she struggled with the significance of the anticipated NCR verdict and felt a need to dig deeper.
Click here to visit the CBC News website to read Karen Paul’s work on NCR in 2009.
Click here to read Dan Lett’s "Making Sense of NCR" - Winnipeg Free Press, posted 1 March 2014.
Dr. Phil Klassen, a psychiatrist with Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences at Whitby, Ontario, has testified as an expert witness in a number of prominent murder cases in which NCR was put forward as a defence. He explains how he goes about an assessment.
At a March 2015 Mindset town hall meeting in Calgary, forensic psychologist and lawyer Dr. Patrick Baillie also stressed that clinical assessments in these cases are thorough, and the chances of anyone “faking it” are slim.
Journalists on the Calgary panel said they often run into a wall of public scepticism on NCR stories, even receiving hate mail when they explain how the system really works. They discussed the range of problems they had encountered.
Two judges - both chairs of their provincial review boards - commented on coverage of NCR cases. On the Calgary town hall panel, the chair of the Alberta Review Board, Mr. Justice Sandy Park, called on journalists to highlight a little-known, disturbing aspect of the NCR system that leads some people who commit quite minor offences to be held for life.
The chairman of the Ontario Review Board, Mr. Justice Richard D. Schneider, told Mindset he sometimes has a knot in his stomach when one of these high-profile reviews comes round.
Issue: Mental Illness & The Prison System
With all the attention paid to NCR cases, journalists also need to be aware that the majority of people with mental illnesses handled by the courts still end up in prison rather than in psychiatric hospitals. It’s an inconvenient fact in both Canada and the United States. In Canada, it underpins cases such as the one involving Ashley Smith, a young woman who eventually killed herself while Canadian prison officers, under orders, failed to intervene. That case received widespread, critical publicity. But it was only the tip of an iceberg. Some health journalists believe the public policies beneath the water of such cases – the mismatch between spending on mental health care and on prisons – could benefit yet from more sustained journalistic attention.
Issue: Police Interactions with People with Mental Illness
Some - but not enough - police forces in Canada have established specially trained units to respond to "wellness checks" on people with mental illnesses, which have a long history of going badly when untrained officers are involved. Family members sometimes conclude that it’s time for an intervention to help a loved one get treatment they may not be ready to seek. The first step is often to call 911 and ask for police help in getting the person to hospital. Heather Stuart, the Bell Canada Mental Health and Stigma Research Chair at Queens’ University, can be shocked by what can happen next.
Studying police interactions with people in distress led a retired Supreme Court judge to conclude Canadian society is failing in its duty of care towards people with mental illnesses. The Hon. Frank Iacobucci was hired by the Toronto Police Service (TPS) to report on police encounters with people in crisis, including those with lethal outcomes. In 2014 he made numerous recommendations about training and ways of reducing bottlenecks in the handling of people with mental health issues who come into contact with police. Read his report.
In 2020, reporter Samantha Beattie and editor Eva Lam won a Mindset Award for Workplace Mental Health Reporting (honourable mention) for their data-based investigation published by HuffPost Canada, titled: Police crisis teams are in short supply as mental health calls multiply in Canada. The journalists contacted police forces across the country to piece together a national survey that showed most wellness checks are still carried out by officers trained only to respond to crimes, rather than by specialized teams trained to act more appropriately.
Mindset asked Mr. Iacobucci how journalists might contribute to improving the situation