Greyhound bus be-header now gets unsupervised outings: where do ethics and accountability draw the line when it comes to mental illness and murder?

By Laura Bohnert

Vincent Li, the man responsible for the brutal slaying of 22-year-old Tim McLean, was granted unsupervised outings earlier this year.

Li, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was found to be not criminally responsible, despite the brutality of his unprovoked stabbing, beheading, and cannibalization of Tim McLean on a Greyhound Canada bus 30 km west of Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, on July 30, 2008.

In an interview with Chris Summerville, executive director of the Schizophrenia Society of Canada, Li stated that he began hearing “the voice of God” in 2004: “I thought I heard the voice of God telling me to write down my journey,” Li states. “The voice told me I was the third story of the Bible. That I was like the second coming of Jesus.”

During his trial, Li’s psychiatrist stated that Li performed the attack because “God’s voice told him McLean was a force of evil and was about to execute him.”

McLean, whom witnesses reported barely acknowledged Li when he sat beside him on the bus and put his headphones on, had apparently fallen asleep when Li began stabbing him.

Li plead not criminally responsible at the trial, indicating his acceptance of the offense, but claiming he was not in control of his own mind, and thus unable to form mens rea which states that “an act is not culpable unless the mind is guilty.”

Li was remanded to a high-security mental health facility in Selkirk, Manitoba where he began receiving psychiatric treatment for his diagnosed schizophrenia. Two years later, on June 3, 2010, the provincial review board granted Li supervised outdoor walks within the facility, and by May 30, 2011, Li’s doctor recommended that since he was responding so well to treatment, he would receive more freedoms, phased in over time. On May 9, 2015, Li was given permission to move into a group home with round-the-clock staff and a curfew, and more recently Li was granted unsupervised day trips into the city.

Li’s increasing freedoms are sparking controversy, despite Summerville’s assurances that Li poses a low risk — as long as he stays on his medication.

“There’s no way the review board would allow him in the community if there was any chance of him returning to the state of where he would do what he did on the bus,” quotes Summerville. “And even if he did return to a state of psychosis, [that] doesn’t mean he would do what he did on the bus.”

According to Summerville, the more pressing concern involves the number of people living with mental illnesses who are not receiving the help they need because “we’re not providing the resources and the services that people need.”

Summerville gestures towards an important point regarding the public response to mental illness. Mental illnesses are illnesses, yet they are widely misunderstood and overlooked, and numerous people tend to go untreated and without help due to a stigma that renders mental illnesses virtually invisible — until something happens to bring them into focus.

While Summerville alludes to an issue that does need vastly more attention, Li’s controversy points to another issue: a man’s life was taken, and no-one is being held accountable for his loss.

Summerville argues that Li’s schizophrenia eliminates his accountability — that schizophrenia rather than Li killed McLean –despite the fact that Li had been experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia for four years prior to McLean’s murder. The accountability falls to the illness rather than the individual in this case — but that isn’t necessarily the case for all illness-related fatalities. In cases of AIDS and HIV, for instance, individuals can be charged with intentionally or recklessly infecting or exposing another individual to the risk of the “criminal transmission.”

Recklessness of the individual, in the case of an illness that is life-threateningly communicable, is judicially held accountable, even when it is the illness that is responsible for the inflicted harm rather than the individual. So, where does one draw the line when it comes to the accountability of mental illness? And. what does it say about the ethical responsibility of the judicial system to the rights of a man whose life was violently taken away from him when the man responsible, whether or not he can claim mental accountability, is every day gaining further freedoms?