I’ll begin my story with the day that I was pulled in, but the roots of that day were set down much earlier than that. Back in July of 2014 I filed charges of advocating genocide against our current Prime Minister and then Foreign Affairs Minister, John Baird. The charges were summarily dismissed less than two weeks later as a matter of governing policy.

While a major violation of international law and treaties, this legal justification unfortunately works fine for the Canadian legal system. Under the Canadian Criminal Code the Attorney General is allowed to shape the prosecution of certain crimes, including by not limited to:

• 7(2.33) – offenses occurring in space
• 7(4.3) – sexual offenses against children
• 7(7) – denying prosecution of criminal foreign nationals
• 54 – assisting a deserter
• 24 – terrorism, hiding terrorist property, banking with terrorists
• 136(3) – providing false evidence
• 141 (2) – bribery
• 164(7) – voyeurism, corruption of morals, child pornography, advertising sexual services
• 283(2) – kidnapping
• 318(3) – advocating genocide
• 319(6) – public incitement of hatred
• 320(7) – denying seizure of hate propaganda
• 347(7) – allowing criminal interest rates
• 385(2) – concealing title documents
• 422(3) – breach of contract, intimidation and discrimination against trade unionists
• 477.2 (1) – offenses committed by a non-citizen on a foreign ship in Canadian waters
• 477.2 (2) – offenses committed in the economic zone of Canada by citizens or in relation to citizens
• 477.2 (3) – offenses committed in non-recognized states (ie: Palestine)
• 477.3 (3) – piracy
• 810.01 (1) – intimidation of the criminal justice system or a journalist
• 810.2 (1) – threatening violence, endanger safety, inflicting psychological damage and various forms of sexual assault

These crimes involve matters than have the potential to shock the conscience of the country. The reason the Attorney General is given so much authority over them is to protect the public from too much media exposure for matters that could damage the public peace. However, the wording of these clauses also allows for bad faith interpretations of laws that give them the ability to simply refuse to prosecute the crime as committed. If a corrupt Attorney General were to be paired with a corrupt Prime Minister or Premier, the results would be disastrous for the effectiveness of the judiciary and faith in law enforcement officials in general. My own incident illustrates how easy it is for a Crown Prosecutor to twist both the word and spirit of the law to suit their own needs. Before I get into that discussion any further, I’m going to talk about why I reacted so strongly to what happened to Mr. Dunphy.

Mr. Dunphy’s situation arose on Easter Sunday, a time traditionally spent with family. For me, it was the first time in several years I could spend the weekend with my entire immediate family. Brothers, sister, their wife, husband, and significant other, parents, nephews and the Love of my Life. Not only that, but we were also enriched by the presence of a new niece not yet a year old and finally able to deliver the Good News that myself and my Love were ourselves expecting a bundle of joy this summer. It was the nicest Easter that I have had yet in my life, but it felt marred when I heard about the shooting of an unnamed man and details began to emerge through Twitter. My gut told me there was something important going on, but I remained calm and waited for the story to be told.

When I finally found out what had brought a gun into Mr. Dunphy’s home and left him dead and his daughter without a father, I was horrified and outraged. Horrified at the inherent stupidity in a system that had not learned enough about social media to click a single button to see the full context of Mr. Dunphy’s words. Outraged at the visible legitimizing by the Premier’s office of a judicial response that created a situation where a gun was brought into a family home where children could be present. All of this due to ignorance and the inability of our current system to fundamentally deal with the complexities of the modern era.

My own understanding of the full context of Mr. Dunphy’s series of tweets is that he expressed his religious beliefs. He hoped that God judges the politicians who look down upon the poor and the unfortunate. His final tweet that was viewed as a threat was taken completely out of the context he’d intended. Read in context, he’s saying that he won’t offend the living by disrespecting the dead. There was nothing hostile or violent in his tweets. Only people with hostile, violent and ignorant minds would interpret them that way.

Mr. Dunphy was completely innocent of any crime. There’s no mens rea (the intending mind) in anything he wrote. Had he been charged with the crime of Uttering Threats, as I have since been, arrested and brought before a judge, he would have been able to provide the judge with the full context of his tweets from that day and been able to satisfy that none of the suggested mens rea that brought the Premier’s private security detail to his door existed in the slightest.

But that is unfortunately not what happened on that fateful day. Instead we hear a story that informs the public that the RNC officer approached Mr. Dunphy shortly after Easter dinner. He introduced himself, entered his home, spoke with him for a while, then Mr. Dunphy’s demeanour changed and he, a man suffering from chronic pain from a debilitating worker’s injury, quickly pulled out a loaded long gun before the officer could react to disarm him, aimed it at the officer, and the officer had to shoot Mr. Dunphy in self-defense.

While my opinion is obviously one of a layperson, I could speculate on what may have happened based on my recent experiences with law enforcement and the mental health system. My first speculation is that the officer could be telling the complete truth, up to the moment where he states Mr. Dunphy aimed a loaded rifle at him. Mr. Dunphy, a man already familiar with the RCMP due to his licensed medical marijuana production, likely felt comfortable allowing a police officer to enter his home. He probably offered him tea and some oatmeal cookies. But at some point during their conversation the officer brought Mr. Dunphy’s tweet into the discussion.

Imagine being confronted with by a single sentence from your life taken so far out of the context it was uttered that it bears no resemblance to the reality of the situation. Mr. Dunphy, having no mens rea, would have been dumbfounded by the accusation. A family man, a man who’s raised a daughter by himself after the passing of his wife at an early age, who kept his spirits up by being a vocal advocate for the poor and the broken, being presented with his own words twisted in such a psychotic fashion as to make him look violently angry and possibly homicidal towards families. Up until this point, Mr. Dunphy has no idea the officer he’s allowed into his home has any hostile intentions towards him, nor that the officer considers him a possible threat.  Mr. Dunphy had done nothing to put himself into a fearful state, unlike the RNC officer, who’s view on reality was becoming psychotic due to flawed and incomplete intelligence.

Likely presented with a printout of his single tweet and bearing witness to the sudden confrontational change in a man he was attempting to be friendly with, a gentle soul like Mr. Dunphy would have tried to immediately placate the officer to restore his peace of mind. Instead of reaching for his rifle to defend himself, it’s much more likely that Mr. Dunphy simply reached for his phone to bring up Twitter. The officer, ignorantly expecting to be in the home of a potentially violent and homicidal man, assumes Mr. Dunphy to be reaching for a concealed weapon and reacts as his training dictates.

What followed in the home after the shooting, only the officer and subsequent investigators know. But as someone who personally fits the psychological profile of Mr. Dunphy more so than that of the Ottawa Shooter as was suggested by the first doctor who assessed me, I can only imagine how the situation was altered before being presented to the public. The initial media slant of the tweet suggested that even those involved in the media release still didn’t realize they hadn’t understood the full context of the tweets. Even the morning after Mr. Dunphy’s death, they were all too happy to pat the officer and themselves on the back over a job well done ‘protecting the public peace.’

Again, this is all speculation on my part, but it seems much more likely to be the case that Mr. Dunphy, an outspoken and intelligent man, suddenly went to pull out his phone and the officer misinterpreted his actions. I see no reason for him to make the conscious decision to threaten a police officer he’d invited into his home with a gun and throw his entire life away.

The way the government of the province and the St. John’s media have treated this incident shows a callous disregard for the value of human life and families that extends downwards from the upper levels of government, but which is thankfully absent in Western Newfoundland. It also exposes a major blindspot in a system unable to cope with the complexities of a rapidly changing world.

My next post will cover the tweet that lead up to my detention on the 4th Floor of the Western Memorial Regional Health for 6 days, including a brief trip before the Supreme Court judge who oversaw the first hearing of my Charter Challenge. I witnessed him having his hands tied by an abuse of the system of common law precedence built on arbitrary schemes. 

I must warn you though, during all of the events that followed, I’m probably the least interesting person in all of them. Despite the system being flawed, there were a number of exceptional people either working or trapped within in it who experience it on a daily basis. I was only a tourist.

I should also note that during my experience every single officer, doctor, nurse and court official I met acted with the grace and patience of a saint… aside from the one lawyer who thought it would be appropriate to create a false pretense before a Supreme Court judge in front of a court full of witnesses.

They are, unfortunately, struggling within a system that favours marginalizing the problems of our society rather than dealing with them head on.

My only hope is that telling their story will help get them the assistance they so desperately need.