To See Justice Done

"I can't imagine what they think is in that interview that would be relevant, which doesn't mean there isn't something.  But one has to ask what is in the other set of scales from the desire to prosecute this heinous crime....  If criminologists are turned into (police) informers, we cannot do our work.  We would be left studying only convicted criminals - the failures - and it's precisely the research we do with unconvicted criminals that is so important."  Simon Fraser University criminologist John Lowman

That's a little like the Crown deal made with Karla Homolka to provide evidence and testify against her husband, giving her a sweetheart deal with Bernardo behind held primarily responsible for the murders of two teen-age girls and other rapes, when Karla Homolka herself was integrally involved in the atrocities, including the fatal drugging and rape of her own younger sister. 

Luka Rocco Magnotta, the disturbed egotist who coldly tortured and murdered and mutilated Chinese university student Lin Jun, has taken steps to ensure that his interview with two University of Ottawa criminologists, Christine Bruckert and Colette Parent, is kept from the prying eyes of the law.  The researchers themselves are invoking "confidentiality privilege", to overturn the search warrant issued on their interview notes.

Research subjects who agree to be intensively and privately interviewed in the search by psychologists and criminologists to discover what makes certain types of personality tick, are promised confidentiality.  Magnotta's case file has been sealed pending his trial for first-degree murder.  And that file includes the search warrant where police found the interview in question three weeks following the Magnotta arrest in Berlin.

Magnotta's lawyer has refused to comment on his client's efforts to retain the interview notes on their promised confidential level.  For the most part when researchers have resisted subpoenas, courts have sustained the confidentiality of their research.  Canada has seen only one previous case of a researcher tasked to identify a subject.  That researcher refused to comply, and no charges were brought to bear.

This particular case represents a crime that is particularly odious, committed by a man who had no scruples about the atrocity he was committing, nor the dreadful and sinister extent of it.  His ego led him to record the torture, murder and mutilation for public screening.  Why then, would it make sense to ensure that enquiry notes about the man's psychological criminal profile were kept from public scrutiny?

A criminal trial needs all the help it can get to successfully prosecute psychopaths, to ensure that they are refused the future freedom to rejoin society as predators on the unsuspecting and vulnerable.  There appears to be ample evidence that Luc Magnotta is a murderer, that he has a fearfully devious mind, that he is totally absorbed with evil, happy to transcend beyond the borders of human depravity.

If notes that could shed any light on the man's background, his eerie state of mind, his thoughts of his place within society, and his life values were made a bit clearer through the use of those transcripts, they should be available to the prosecution, and even perhaps for later study by those same criminologists determined to shield them from public scrutiny.

Magnotta is so self-involved, so eager and anxious for public notice and acclaim for his deviant acts, he would in all likelihood have seen fit to waive confidentiality for the pleasure he might have derived from revealing his inner thoughts to two researchers, professionally engaged in investigating humankind's descent into utter pathological wretchedness.