Fortunately, the trial of Vincent Li – the man who murdered Tim McLean on a Greyhound bus last summer – has ended.

The daily updates on the murder trial, in which Li was found not criminally responsible (NCR) for his actions, were filled with calls for vengeance by McLean’s family. Li’s fate now rests at a high security mental hospital in Selkirk, where he will be treated for schizophrenia.

Yet, there are many who have found little satisfaction with this result. They claim that Li is getting off easy for the cruel acts which he committed. They think that justice would only have been served if Li had been sent to jail for the murder, dismemberment and cannibalization of McLean.

This is a simplistic sense of justice, where bad guys are always bad guys, and in the end must get what they deserve. Punishment, in this sense, should always be doled out to wrongdoers, regardless of any extenuating circumstances. Though this division between criminals and the rest of us makes sense in movies, the division is rarely that cut and dry when played out in real life.

“ Those in the ‘jail Li’ crowd have a strict and somewhat archaic notion about justice

hich provided a breeding ground for the crowd fond of this antiquated division. Those in the “jail Li” crowd have a strict and somewhat archaic notion about justice, resorting to clichéd Biblical references like “an eye for an eye” as justification enough to condemn a man with severe mental illness to prison for the rest of his life.

This caused a re-emergence of calls for “Tim’s Law,” first proposed last fall by McLean’s mother Carol de Delley, but reiterated by her and her family through many of their media appearances last week. This “law” would seek to mitigate the chances of claiming NCR on behalf of accused murders. Instead, it would maintain that as legal precedent all those found guilty of murder should be sent to prison regardless of their mental state at the time of their crime.

Thankfully, this medieval suggestion on how best to deal with murderers who are found to be mentally ill does not stand a hope in hell of ever passing into federal law. It undermines one of the fundamental principles which our criminal justice system rests upon: that to be found guilty of a crime, one must have “guilty mind” in committing it.

More simply, it must be found beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused fully understood that their commitment of a crime was wrong – an understanding that medical experts say Li did not possess.

There are those in the public that will always view Li’s commitment to a mental institution rather than a maximum security prison as an insult to the justice system, as just another flagrant indication of how soft we as a society have become on crime. Heartfelt pleas will be made on behalf of the despairing members of McLean’s family, who rightly have cause for their disbelief in what has so unfairly been taken from them – both McLean himself and any semblance of personal justice.

Yet, it must be kept in mind that our criminal justice system is not set up to provide punishment of the guilty to the satisfaction of victims. That model has been relegated to the confines of history. Instead, ours is one that sees crime as committed against society in general. The judging of the accused is left to those experts entrusted to do so, and not the vengeful will of victims.

Published in Volume 63, Number 23 of The Uniter (March 12, 2009)