For the Harry Potter fans, the title of this article would have certainly struck a chord and the visual of a wizard with a disfigured nose would have appeared in your mind. Harry Potter’s nemesis certainly had a name but the wizarding world lived by the inherent belief that uttering his them would be giving power to his evil and his wrath. On March 3rd, 2021, Justice Anne Molly of the Ontario Superior Court refused to take the killers name in her decision and referred to him simple as John Doe. Justice Molly found the offender guilty of 10 counts of first-degree murder and 16 counts of attempted murder in connection with the 2018 Toronto van attack.
The Case
He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named had pleaded not guilty to 10 counts of first-degree murder and 16 counts of attempted murder. Throughout his trial, his lawyers argued the 28-year-old should be found not criminally responsible for his actions on April 23, 2018 due to autism spectrum disorder.
On that day, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named drove a rented white van down busy sidewalks along Yonge Street, between Finch and Sheppard avenues. He struck dozens of people, ultimately killing eight women and two men.
The victims were 85-year-old Munir Abdo Habib Najjar, 45-year-old Chul “Eddie” Min Kang, 30-year-old Anne Marie D’Amico, 80-year-old Dorothy Sewell, 55-year-old Beutis Renuka Amarasingha, 94-year-old Mary Elizabeth Forsyth, 22-year-old So He Chung, 33-year-old Andrea Bradden, 83-year-old Geraldine Brady, and 22-year-old Ji Hun Kim.
The Law
It was admitted at the start of the six-week Zoom trial late last year that the offender planned and carried out the mass killing, reserving a white van three weeks in advance.
Justice Molloy was left to decide only whether the offender was not criminally responsible due to a mental disorder, which required her to first determine if autism spectrum disorder alone can be considered a mental disorder for the purposes of the legal test.
In a first for Canadian courts, and after considering expert evidence and the few decisions that exist elsewhere in the world on this issue, Justice Molloy found that autism spectrum disorder could qualify particularly in severe forms, given that the developmental disorder can impact brain functioning and thought processes.
However, she emphasized this only means some people with ASD might be eligible for the defence and says nothing about any connection between ASD and criminality — a misconception autism advocacy groups have worried about. The assessment of criminal responsibility depends on the manifestation of the mental disorder in a specific accused person and the circumstances of the crime, she said.
In this case, she soundly rejected the testimony of an American expert central to the defence who sought to argue the offender’s inability to empathize with his victims distorted his thinking so that he could not morally reason.
She said Dr. Alexander Westphal, a Yale-based forensic psychiatrist who specializes in autism spectrum disorder, was an unreliable witness who made unfounded assumptions and failed to include critical information in his report which directly contradicted his opinions.
Those contradictions were only revealed when she ordered him to produce his notes and the recordings of his interviews with the offender to the Crown, she said.
In her verdict, Justice Molloy said that the offender “knew that his plan to run down and kill people constituted first-degree murder and that if arrested, he would go to jail for the rest of his life. That is why his plan was to ‘die-by-cop.’ Death being preferable to jail.” This in law is what is referred as the mens rea, or mental element/intent.
“Mr. Doe knew that the vast majority of people in society would find an act of mass murder to be morally wrong. However, he apparently wanted to achieve fame and notoriety, believing that even negative attention for his actions would be better than to live in obscurity. “He had been fantasizing about a crime such as this for over a decade.”
A sentencing hearing, which will be held virtually on March 18, will determine at what point the offender will be eligible to apply for parole. First-degree murder carries a mandatory parole ineligibility period of 25 years but the judge could decide on a longer period of ineligibility based on the number of victims.
The Criminology
Persons committing murder and other forms of violent crime are likely to exhibit a personality disorder (PD) of one type or another. Essentially any personality disorder can be associated with violent crime, with the possible exception of avoidant PD. This includes those described in DSM as well as other disorders such as sadistic PD and psychopathy. The latter two, along with antisocial and paranoid PDs, are the most common personality accompaniments of violent crime. Narcissistic traits (if not narcissistic PD (NPD) itself) are almost universal in this domain, since violent offenders usually place their own desires and urges far above those of other persons. While admixtures of traits from several disorders are common among violent offenders, certain ones are likely to be the main disorder: antisocial PD, Psychopathy, Sadistic PD, Paranoid PD and NPD. Instrumental (as opposed to impulsive) the behavior of the offender in this case are strongly associated with NPD. Men committing serial sexual homicide usually show psychopathy and sadistic PD; half these men also show schizoid PD. Mass murderers usually show strong paranoid traits. With a focus on murder, clinical examples drawn from the crime literature and from the author’s personal interviews reflect 14 varieties of personality disorder. Animal torture before adulthood is an important predictor of future violent (including sadistic) crime. Whereas many antisocial persons are eventually capable of rehabilitation, this is rarely the case with psychopathic or sadistic persons. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named was diagnosed with Autism-Spectrum-Disorder. But his merciless actions were not the product of his diagnosed disorder but was the result of who he was as a person. The offender is antisocial, impulsive, narcissist, and a psychopath who was out to gain fame and notoriety through his cowardly actions and hoped his name will be omnipresent. Instead, he was called John Doe, in court and now is the new evil, an evil Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.
