A person stands outside the Manitoba Law Courts during the trial of Jeremy Skibicki, in Winnipeg, on May 8.JOHN WOODS/The Canadian Press
In a case that lawyers and scholars believe will be studied for years to come, a superior court judge is expected to decide this week whether a man who admitted to killing four First Nations women in Winnipeg had the mental capacity required to knowingly commit first-degree murder.
The issue is not whether Jeremy Skibicki killed the women, but whether he was able to appreciate or understand that his killings were crimes. Should he be found not criminally responsible, he would be directed to court-ordered treatment in a mental-health facility instead of imprisonment.
After a weeks-long trial that began in early May, Manitoba Court of King’s Bench Justice Glenn Joyal is scheduled to deliver his verdict on Thursday.
The defence team’s strategy of arguing that Mr. Skibicki is not criminally responsible for his actions – commonly referred to as NCR – is very rare in Canada.
While there have been high-profile instances in recent years of people accused of murder receiving NCR verdicts – such as Matthew de Grood in Alberta, who killed five people in a stabbing spree, and Vince Li in Manitoba, who beheaded a man on a Greyhound bus – these cases remain statistical anomalies.
Figures compiled for The Globe and Mail by Statistics Canada show that, between 2000 and 2022, of 8,883,749 criminal cases prosecuted across the country, only 5,178 – just 0.06 per cent – resulted in NCR verdicts.
“For it to be used in the context of a murder charge is unusual already, but then to see this NCR defence for four charges makes this case so incredibly unprecedented that it will inevitably become the source of much legal research in the future,” said Toronto-based Anita Szigeti, who has co-authored several textbooks on Canadian mental-health law. A litigator for more than 30 years, Ms. Szigeti is one of many people in the legal sector watching Mr. Skibicki’s case closely.
According to an agreed statement of facts by both the Crown and the defence, Mr. Skibicki killed four women in 2022: a yet-to-be-identified woman whom Indigenous elders have named Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, meaning Buffalo Woman, on or around March 15 of that year; 39-year-old Morgan Harris on or around May 1; 26-year-old Marcedes Myran on or around May 4; and 24-year-old Rebecca Contois on or around May 15.
Over the course of the trial, the Crown argued that Mr. Skibicki preyed on his victims in a calculated manner and did not suffer from – nor has he ever been diagnosed with – any form of schizophrenia. The prosecutors presented graphic evidence, including testimonies from more than a dozen witnesses and the video of Mr. Skibicki’s confession to police, during which he admitted to killing the women, then dismembering and dumping their remains.
But the British psychiatrist who was the only witness to testify in the 37-year-old’s defence told The Globe that Mr. Skibicki’s severe disconnection from reality should negate his criminal responsibility.
In an interview, forensic consultant Sohom Das said examining Mr. Skibicki was one of the most gruelling experiences of his medico-legal career. “He was completely detached from everything he had done,” said the doctor from the North London borough of Enfield, who was hand-picked by Mr. Skibicki’s defence team from Legal Aid Manitoba and flown in for court last month.
“There was not even an ounce of emotion. He wasn’t gloating, he wasn’t happy, he wasn’t remorseful, he wasn’t regretful. Nothing, absolutely nothing,” Dr. Das said. “He was talking to me about the horrific, horrific things he did just plainly, as if he was walking over to a local shop to buy something.”
Such detachment is not always indicative of mental illness, Dr. Das said. “Though I really believe that, in this case, it is,” he said. “This is a man with chronic paranoid schizophrenia. Of course, the Crown, however, disagrees with that.”
The defence’s entire case rested upon Dr. Das’s assessment of Mr. Skibicki – a point the psychiatrist said has weighed on him since his testimony, particularly because of his outsized role in arguing for the NCR verdict.
“I don’t think that either myself or any other psychiatrist would say it was easy to diagnose Mr. Skibicki,” said Dr. Das, who has never previously testified in a Canadian court. “My expectation, in fact, was that there might have been more psychiatric witnesses brought in, as I have seen for similar cases in the U.K. And if I’m being honest, I’m really not quite sure why that wasn’t the case here.”
Mr. Skibicki’s defence attorney Leonard Tailleur told The Globe this week that “more is not necessarily better” in terms of expert witnesses. He acknowledged the peculiarities of his NCR strategy, saying it is “not used very often in homicide cases, let alone in serial homicide cases.”
He compared Mr. Skibicki’s case with other mass killings in Canada in which the psychosis of accused people manifested in relatively shorter periods of time, such that it led to singular explosive events, in turn allowing them to be found not criminally responsible for their actions. But Mr. Tailleur said this case is different because Mr. Skibicki’s homicides were spread over a lengthier period.
Crown attorney Christian Vanderhooft said he would only be able to comment at length on the case after Justice Joyal’s decision. But he pointed out that this case also highlights concerns about the timing of such a defence strategy – specifically, when the defence notifies the court about an NCR application.
The fact that Mr. Skibicki’s lawyers were able to raise the NCR issue on the eve of the trial was “somewhat unusual,” Mr. Vanderhooft explained. He said prosecutors retained a psychiatric expert to rebut Dr. Das because they didn’t want him to be the only such witness presented in court, adding that it was a “situation the defence counsel was trying to create” through a privately solicited assessment.
“And, of course, they didn’t supply us with his report until the case had actually started.”
Police arrested Jeremy Skibicki on May 17, 2022. A shortened video of his 20-hour interrogation was played in court during his trial this year before being released to The Globe and Mail.
The Globe and Mail
Brandon Trask, an assistant professor of law at the University of Manitoba, is worried about a successful NCR verdict being reached in this case. “I would be concerned if I saw this become a launching pad for opposition to the NCR regime in our criminal justice system. We need more consideration for mental health, not less,” said the former Crown prosecutor in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador, who has been involved in hundreds of criminal cases.
“But perhaps equally so, I would also be concerned if we saw this case become a way for other people facing murder charges to argue by default that they are NCR, too.”