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Originally Posted by Mightyfire89
My opinion is that this guy purposely cut a man's head off and should therefore lose his normal privileges as a Canadian citizen. I don't care that doctors have determined that he was mentally ill at the time but is now "rehabilitated"or whatever the term would be. There should be absolutely no unconditional release ever for someone in a case like this.
The whole not criminally responsible thing is a crock of ****. If you kill someone and it's been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that you did it (not accidentally, but purposely), you should never be out of prison for the rest of your life. Period.
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Let me ask you a question, have you ever had a thought in your mind that you can't get rid of. A flash of paranoia that everyone is out to get you, that the government has planted chips in your head to control your thoughts and your neighbor is actually a spy and is going to kill you?
Or that your daughter is a demon intent on killing your and sending you to hell.
Or you have 100 voices in your head telling you that its ok to kill the person sitting next to you because he's evil and his death will save lives.
Vincent Li is not criminally responsible because what's happening in his brain is uncontrollable and unbalanced.
This wasn't a man who would normally kill someone or even hurt anyone, but because of a imbalance, or simply how his brain developed simply lives in what would almost be a different reality then everyone else. Literally his brain is at war with his brain. And it might result in loss of impulse control, or not knowing or being able to understand the difference between right and wrong. or having the feeling that everyone is your enemy.
the old running joke is "Holy shyte I think my brain is trying to kill me". For people with severe mental illnesses its not a joke.
They aren't responsible because the one thing that in normal people makes us responsible doesn't function properly. Or maybe it does and all of us sane people are crazy.
For the most part, and I'm usually careful when I say it its something that can either be cured or managed, with the cured part never being a complete certainty.
The scariest point in my life was when I dated a girl for about 6 months and then one day she let me in on a secret that she felt she was being constantly watched. Ok, I thought, she maybe has a stalker ex boyfriend. So being naive about it I started to get more vigilant, she'd call me in the middle of the night convinced that someone was watching her. Ok, I thought she's jittery. then she told me that I needed to take the dash out of the car because she was convinced that someone was bugging her car. At first you humor them, because maybe its just something due to her stress, or she's a little too obsessed with spy movies, or whatever. Then she started pointing out specific people, neighbors or co workers or whatever, they were the ones responsible and she was going to prove it. But even if she did, it didn't matter because they were all part of a massive conspiracy. So now, you know that something is seriously wrong. You start to wonder how safe you are with her. That maybe your first instinct should be self preservation, and you should get out now.
Or maybe you should try to convince her to get help. and you talk to her about it, that she's scaring you a bit with these fantasies. and that you think she really needs to talk to someone. And she agrees and your relieved, and you start researching where you should go. Then she tells you that she needs to go to home for a while. So that makes sense. Then you get an email from her accusing you of being one of them and to leave her alone. Now to be honest, my reaction was pretty much a fist pump and a singing of the Who's "I'm free".
I don't know what happened to her, or where she is. But I do think about it quit a bit. Mental illness isn't always apparent, its not always some homeless raving lunatic raving about Xenu and aliens. It can be incredibly subtle and just happen, and a person can seem normal for 24 hours a day 365 days a year, and then it happens. Or in a lessor case like depression, its just hard to see it from the outside, and the person because of the stigma of depression hides it until one day it overwhelms them.
Does that sound like someone that's responsible for her actions? Or someone that's driven by something else?
Li isn't a monster, for god sakes, I doubt on any other day that he's a killer. On that day, that mental illness manifested itself in a violent and horrifying way that at the time to Li seemed right and logical because of his illness.
I'm not opposed to releasing him, I'm certainly not possessed to him being given every single opportunity to lead a normal life. In fact I hope he does.
I feel for the victims family, and I understand their anger and concern. But I also have the concerns of a release that can't be bound by conditions for the rest of his life.
But to say that you hate the idea of NCR and its BS, that's just wrong man. A person with severe mental illnesses, simply can't be responsible, because their condition isn't controllable without intervention