Comments on: Borutski trial part five: The law of “not criminally responsible”

By: Pamela Cross

Pamela Cross — Tue, 07 Nov 2017 18:44:17 +0000

In reply to Toni.

Just to show that statistics abound and do not always agree with one another, here are some slightly different numbers as collected by the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics CCJS), which collects information from police forces and courts across the country.

According to the CCJS, from 2005/2006 to 2011/2012, there were more than two million (2,000,000) adult criminal cases in Canada. (If smaller numbers are easier for you to absorb, that is a little more than 300,000 a year). Of these,1,908 (or, between 252 and 292 a year) resulted in NCRMD outcomes, which is less than 1% of all adult criminal cases. (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2014001/article/14085-eng.htm)

In my books, the fewer people who have guns the better, period. However, since most men who kill women and most people who kill anyone with a gun have never been diagnosed with a mental illness, I am not sure that focusing gun restrictions on people with a history of mental illness is going to solve the problem of gun-facilitated violence.

By: Toni

Toni — Tue, 07 Nov 2017 16:07:27 +0000

This is really important information about a little understood aspect of the criminal justice system. Thanks for the clear explanation. I was particularly interested in the statistics you cite. If only 8.1% of 1000 NCR findings have to do with crimes of serious violence, that means… the extremely small number of 0.162 such findings involve such crimes. It would be interesting to know how many years it would take to come up with one full number based on these statistics. And then you say that the people sentenced to mental hospital as a result have the lowest recidivism rate of all. While there could be many different reasons for that last statistic, it certainly underscores the exaggerated fears expressed in much of the public rhetoric surrounding cases where a mentally ill person has committed a seriously violent crime. Nonetheless, it doesn’t seem to me to constitute a good reason to applaud the recent Presidential executive order in the US which softens restrictions on selling guns to people with a history of mental illness.