Luka Magnotta guilty on all counts

[Transborderwife 4,666]

MONTREAL Luka Rocco Magnotta is guilty of first-degree murder in the shocking 2012 killing and dismemberment of Chinese exchange student Jun Lin.

The decision means the 32-year-old Ontario man, a self-styled playboy, male escort and porn actor, will be headed to a federal prison rather than psychiatric hospital after the jury rejected defence arguments that Magnotta was suffering a psychotic episode at the time of the killing.

Read more: Who is Luka Rocco Magnotta?

He has also been convicted on the four other charges he faced: criminally harassing Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other members of Parliament; mailing obscene and indecent material; committing an indignity to a body; and publishing obscene materials.

The verdicts came down just before 11:20 a.m. on the eighth day of jury deliberations at the Montreal courthouse.

Magnotta admitted from the outset that he had killed Lin and cut up the corpse, but the verdict means the jury latched onto evidence showing he had planned the murder in advance and was of sound mind when he committed the act in his Montreal apartment between the night of May 24, 2012 and the early morning hours of the next day.

In the hours after the killing, Magnotta also edited and posted a video of the defilement and dismemberment of Lin's body to the Internet under the gruesome title 1Lunatic 1Icepick.

Crown prosecutor Louis Bouthillier argued throughout the 11-week trial that Magnotta had a well-considered plan to commit the murder and took great efforts to cover his tracks by fleeing Canada for France and later Germany, where he was finally arrested at a Berlin Internet cafe while reading news reports of the international manhunt.

Among the evidence put forward by the Crown was an email Magnotta sent to a British newspaper reporter in December 2011, six months before the murder. In the message, Magnotta talked about moving on from the cat-killing videos he had previously produced and posted, and suggested his next victim would be human and that the murder would be filmed.

The Crown also revealed that Magnotta had filmed another individual tied to his bed in a pose identical to that of Lin and that this footage made up the opening seconds of the infamous murder video. Security camera footage from Magnotta's Montreal apartment showed the man walking groggily out the front doors the morning of May 19, 2012. The identity of this man remains a mystery.

The jury also viewed reams of surveillance footage that showed Magnotta methodically disposing of evidence of his crime in the early hours of May 25, 2012. Police would later discover an electric saw, a hammer, screw drivers, scissors, a laptop computer, a video camera, a dead puppy and blood-soaked clothing belonging to both Magnotta and Lin in the trash outside the crime scene.

Lin's headless torso was discovered stuffed into a suitcase that the Crown said had been slashed and spray painted so that it would not look out of place in the trash.

In the hours after the killing, Magnotta was also able to edit and distribute the murder video, book airplane tickets to France and mail Lin's hands and feet to the federal Conservative and Liberal parties in Ottawa and two schools in Vancouver. Lin's head was discovered weeks later in the thick bushes of a Montreal park.

Those elements of a crime that stunned the country and made headlines around the world proved more convincing for the jury than the evaluation and testimony of two psychiatrists for the defence who said that Magnotta was suffering a psychotic episode when he killed Lin.

Magnotta, who had a previous diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, confided to one of those psychiatrists that the killing occurred after Lin hurt Magnotta while they were having sex.

Magnotta didnt testify in his own defence, but explained to the psychiatrist that he looked out his apartment window shortly after the incident in which he was hurt and noticed what he perceived to be a suspicious black car. He said that his deluded, racing mind led him to conclude that he was under surveillance and that Lin was a government agent sent to cause him harm.

Magnotta was also found guilty of four other charges: committing an indignity to a body, distribution of obscene material, transmitting obscene material through the mail and criminal harassment.

http://m.thestar.com/#/article/news/canada/2014/12/23/luka_magnotta_is_convicted_of_firstdegree_murder.html

Glad they got this right. Hopefully he will get life without parole as good old Canada has no death penalty.