Lin Diran, father of victim Lin Jun, walks to the courtroom for the murder trial of Luka Magnotta in Montreal on Monday. Photo: RYAN REMIORZ/The Canadian Press MONTREAL — As lawyer Daniel Urbas said Monday, in his kind but un-theatrical manner, of Lin Jun’s poor father, no matter what happens here at the trial of his son’s killer, “It will not get any better for him.”
But things could get much brighter for the man now on trial for first-degree murder and assorted other offences in Lin’s May 25, 2012 slaying and dismemberment, one Luka Rocco Magnotta, né Eric Newman of Toronto.
In a curious sequence of events, Magnotta was formally arraigned and duly sombrely uttered two words — not guilty — to each of the five counts he faces.
Minutes later, Quebec Superior Court Judge Guy Cournoyer told the jurors Magnotta “admits the acts or the conduct underlying the five offences” and that their task is to “determine if the Crown has proven he committed the offences with required state of mind for each offence.”
In other words, it’s now a sad-not-bad trial that could see Magnotta, 32, found not criminally responsible, or NCR, and face not a lengthy prison sentence but an indefinite term in a mental-health institution.
Crown prosecutor Louis Bouthillier, left, leaves the the Montreal Courthouse as jury selection begins in the Luka Magnotta murder trial. (Graham Hughes/ Canadian Press)
Fittingly, in a province where language is so often at the centre of things, so it is again here, only this time it’s Latin: Magnotta, as his lawyer, Luc Leclair, told the jurors, admits the “actus reus” (the prohibited or guilty acts) but not the “mens rea” (the guilty mind).
In addition to the murder of Lin, a 33-year-old student from China who was studying at Concordia University, Magnotta is charged with committing an indignity to a human body, publishing and mailing obscene material (via a video he posted online within hours of Lin’s death and by snail-mailing his hands and feet across the country) and criminally harassing Prime Minister Stephen Harper through “writings that accompanied those body parts.”
Leclair, who delivered the first part of his opening in French — though it’s because his client is a unilingual anglophone that the court selected only fully bilingual jurors and is providing simultaneous translation — told the jurors the defence will focus on Magnotta’s state of mind because “otherwise, you might say, ‘Well, why are we here?’
“Mr. Magnotta is going to raise the issue of mental disorder,” he said, and promised “I will show that at the time of the events, he was not criminally responsible.”
To that end, Leclair delivered a rambling history — it appears he has not met a sentence he is moved to complete — of Magnotta’s early days and various diagnoses.
In this artist’s sketch, Luke Rocco Magnotta watches proceedings on the opening day of his first-degree murder trial. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Mike McLaughlin)
He told the jurors Magnotta’s father, Donald Newman, is a schizophrenic and that his wife, who isn’t Magnotta’s mother, is too. Leclair said he anticipates Newman will testify, but warned, “he is a bit of a mercurial person.”
It was Newman, Leclair said, who first took his client to a doctor because he was worried something was wrong with him.
At different times, he said, Magnotta has been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, as a just-plain schizophrenic, as psychotic and as suffering borderline personality disorder, one of the hardest to treat disorders but, as with other such illnesses, not often seen as precluding someone from appreciating what he’s doing.
In fact, Leclair said, about two months before Lin’s death Magnotta saw a psychiatrist at Montreal Jewish General and had a one-hour assessment.
It was that doctor who diagnosed him as a borderline, one of those who are terrified of abandonment, prone to chaotic relationships and sometimes risky behaviour.
“Probably, if it (the assessment) was done another way,” Leclair said casually, “we wouldn’t be here today.”
Another sketch of Luke Rocco Magnotta on Day One of his first-degree murder trial in Montreal. (Sketch by Atalante)
With that remark and others — he said a Toronto Sun reporter who interviewed Magnotta in 2007 thought he was acting oddly “but, you know, nothing was done” — Leclair seemed to suggest his client had been failed.
Yet prosecutor Louis Bouthillier painted a very different picture in his no-nonsense opening address.
He told the jurors the evidence will show the murder of Lin was planned “up to six months in advance” and that in the notorious video Magnotta posted online, the first 53 seconds were shot a week before Lin’s death and feature “another man, alive and bound” in the same manner that Lin was bound, though he was never seen alive again after being caught on surveillance camera, entering Magnotta’s apartment building.
The inference was clear: This was Magnotta’s dry run, with the unidentified man surely the luckiest in Montreal.
The approximately 11 minutes of video were once described by Leclair “as graphic, gruesome and potentially upsetting.” Bouthillier said flatly, “and they are.”
Crown prosecutor Louis Bouthillier at the Montreal courthouse. (John Kenney / THE GAZETTE)
Jurors got their first unhappy taste of what’s to come when Caroline Simoneau, a Montreal police photographer, described dozens of crime scene pictures as they flashed on screen.
Bouthillier said a British reporter from the London Sun will testify that in December 2011, he tracked down Magnotta in London (in connection with a cat-killing video, Leclair later elaborated) and recorded their meeting. Magnotta followed this up with an email to the newspaper, saying “he was planning to kill a human being and that he was going to make a movie.”
Lin’s torso was found in a suitcase, his legs and arms in garbage bags, outside Magnotta’s building within days of his death. His head was discovered a month later in a park.
Bouthillier noted that “You often hear, in society in general, that there is no justice. You will live the justice experience from the inside here,” he told the jurors, his clear hope they will find it alive and well and living in Montreal.
Lin’s father, Lin Diran, is the only family member attending the trial, with his mother and sister remaining in China, too shattered to even enter the Palais de Justice. Urbas, who is representing the family pro bono, said the father is mostly watching the trial from a small private room.
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