Mental illness & murder: Perception that an insanity defence is a loophole is simply not true
Studies show offenders found not criminally responsible due to mental disorder actually spend more time in custody
November 6, 2026
Once or twice a day in early January 2024, 68-year-old John Smith would say to his son Brian "you don't know what's coming.”
Sometimes he would say the opposite: "you know what's coming.”
On Jan. 11, John went to his family doctor accompanied by Brian and his daughter, Meryl, the latter of whom he told, with tears in his eyes, "you know you've been a really good daughter but I don't want you involved in this. I want you to carry on your life. You have your family."
The statements were part of an increasing pattern of unusual behaviour, sometimes paranoid, sometimes just irrational. John spent the next five days taking his medication, sitting and ruminating all day. He would look out the windows as if awaiting something.
Then, just before 1 p.m. on Jan. 17, 2024, John got a knife and started to attack his wife, Susan.
(Ed. note: These are real people, these are not their real names, which are protected by a publication ban.)
She screamed at him to stop and yelled for help. Brian heard the screams, came running and pulled his father to the floor, took away the knife and told him to "stay down," while Susan called 911.
"Get off of me. Let go of the knife," Susan told her husband as she bled on the floor. "Snap out of it right now."
He did not snap out of it. John got away, went to the kitchen and got a larger, sharper knife and continued his attack on Susan. His son continued to try to save his mother by blocking the knife blows with his hands.
"He slashed my fucking throat," Susan told the 911 call taker.
Brian was stabbed in the hands repeatedly. Eventually, John stabbed Susan through the throat. She died shortly after, prior to police arriving. Brian saw his mother's eyes close after she was stabbed.
"I killed her," John said, the only words he spoke until that point, according to Brian's account.
When police arrived at 1:09 p.m., Chilliwack RCMP members located Susan, John and Brian lying in a pool of blood under the dining room table. Susan was face down with her legs intertwined with John's legs. He was not co-operative as police tried to arrest him nor did he fight or speak.
Officers said he seemed catatonic, absent. When interviewed later that day and the next, he did not provide a version of the events but he did say the killing was not planned.
"In my mind, I think I was thinking that somebody was going to take them, take her, and hurt them. That's all. I just wanted – just stop them from taking them.”
After an investigation by the Lower Mainland’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT), John was charged with the second-degree murder of his 66-year-old wife.
The question then arose: Was he insane? In modern legal language that's not criminally responsible by reason of mental disorder (NCRMD). All persons charged with crimes are presumed to be criminally responsible. The burden of proof for being not criminally responsible lies with the party that raises the issue.
Mental disorder is defined in section 2 of the criminal code, and the case law of R. v. Cooper from 1980 defines it for the purposes of NCRMD as: “…any illness, disorder, or abnormal condition which impairs the human mind and its functioning, excluding . . . self-induced states . . . [for example drugs or alcohol or] transitory mental states such as . . . a concussion.”
Once it is determined there is a mental disorder, a second aspect of the analysis requires an assessment of the accused's capacity to appreciate what was done was wrong. And not just legally wrong but morally wrong, a distinction relied upon in case law from 1990 in R. v. Chaulk.
Two different psychiatrists provided assessments of John for the court leading up to, during, and after the offence. Dr. Shabehram Lohrasbe determined that he was suffering from a psychosis and he was acutely and severely psychotic on the date of the offence. Dr. Mandeep Saini concluded that he had a major depressive disorder with psychotic features that predated the incident, and that while J.B. might have the intellectual ability to know right from wrong, his depressive disorder and delusions compromised his ability to understand moral wrongfulness.
BC Supreme Court Justice Richard Fowler concluded in a July 11, 2025 decision that John was not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder for the murder of his wife.
Get out of jail free card
The finding of NCRMD meant that John was not sentenced to prison for life as a non-NCRMD accused would have been for second-degree murder. It meant he would be sent to a mental health facility until such time as the independent body that oversees NCRMD cases determines he can be safely released.
So did John get a free pass? A “get out of jail free card,” as an insanity defence is often described?
A 2021 study in the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice looked at the social media narratives around the insanity defence and found the predominant theme that the insanity defence is thought to be a legal loophole.
The research looked at approximately 5,000 Tweets relating to the high-profile 2016 case of Matthew de Grood, the son of a Calgary police inspector who was found NCRMD for stabbing five people to death at a Calgary house party in 2014. A qualitative analysis of the public social media posts found that the case was a misappropriation of the legal defence and that NCRMD was a miscarriage of justice.
“A need for public education about the forensic psychiatric system is evident,” the study concluded, “misconceptions about the insanity defence appeared pervasive.”
Lapu-Lapu Day killings
On Tuesday (Nov. 2, 2026), Kai-Ji Adam Lo appeared in BC Supreme Court in Vancouver via video from Forensic Psychiatric Hospital in Port Coquitlam where he pleaded not guilty to 11 counts of second-degree murder and 31 counts of attempted murder.
Lo is the man alleged to have driven an SUV into a crowd at the Lapu-Lapu Day festival in East Vancouver on April 26, 2025, killing and injuring dozens of people.
In September 2025, Lo was determined to be fit to stand trial, but that doesn’t mean he can’t still plead NCRMD.
There are several reasons why a person might be considered mentally unable to form the mens rea to understand their actions in one moment but be perfectly capable in another. A person who is deeply schizophrenic but is properly medicated could certainly understand their actions. Just as an otherwise sane person in a drug-induced psychosis might not be able to.
But studies show the finding of NCRMD is not only not a get out of jail free card, on the contrary, people who are found not criminally responsible due to mental disorder are more likely to be detained in custody, and for longer periods of time, than those found criminally responsible for similar offences.
A study by BC Mental Health and Substance Use Services (BCMHSUS), part of the Provincial Health Services Authority, looked at the NCRMD court finding in a report entitled "Not Criminally Responsible: not a get-out-of-jail-free card.”
The study involved researchers in B.C., Ontario, and Quebec that compared people found NCRMD over a five-year period, people who were convicted of similar offences in the criminal system and controlled for factors such as age, race, and sex to provide an ‘apples-to-apples’ comparison. The findings were published in January, 2022 in the journal Frontiers of Psychiatry.
“Contrary to perceptions about the NCRMD defence being a ‘get out of jail free card,’ the reality is that NCRMD accused undergo considerable periods of detention and supervision, as compared to their convicted counterparts.”
That from the discussion portion of the study.
“In the light of this large sample study allowing a contemporary comparison between the trajectories of individuals found NCRMD and convicted offenders, it is possible to see, as in previous studies, that the insanity defence is not a loophole, but also that more restrictive laws being adopted regarding this vulnerable population are unnecessary.”
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Paul J. Henderson
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