Only Pickton was so perverse: Bruce McArthur deserves 50 years without parole, according to Crown

TORONTO – To the investigators charged with asking Bruce McArthur to report on each of his crimes, Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam was the unknown, the only one they could not find the face of and they desperately wanted to learn the name – desperately enough to last March must publish a cropped picture of him, calling the mbades to give him an identity in death. Soon, the remains found in plastic bags inside a pot provided an answer.

For McArthur, Kanagaratnam was a corpse without identity: the victim 5, named as such in a digital file in which he kept bad photos of the man, a line on the neck, eyes closed while he was lying on the bed of his badbadin. They are iconic pictures that McArthur took and saved from other men that he murdered.

For Piranavan Thangavel, Kanagaratnam was a friend, one of the 491 other asylum seekers who fled the Sri Lankan violence on the MV Sea Sea in the summer of 2010. They sailed for three months with great hope and landed in Canada full of "indescribable joy," Thangavel said Tuesday at the sentencing hearing against McArthur for eight counts of first-degree murder.

Then Kanagaratnam disappeared and the people who knew him finally understood why. Thangavel now lives with the helplessness of believing that nowhere in the world is safe.

"It really could have been any of us, or other refugees who live in fear," said Thangavel.

It really could have been any of us

In the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Tuesday, Crown Attorneys requested that McArthur be sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for 50 years for the murder of Kanagaratnam and seven other men – Selim Esen, Abdulbasir Faizi, Majeed Kayhan, Andrew Kinsman, Andrew Lisowick, Soroush Mahmudi and Skandaraj Navaratnam – in Toronto between 2010 and 2017.

The eight counts of murder are punishable by a mandatory life sentence with no possibility of parole for 25 years. The maximum sentence that Justice John McMahon could impose is a 150-year parole ineligibility sentence, depending on the number of counts (six) that McArthur could be sentenced to serve consecutively.

Assistant counsel Craig Harper stated in the Crown's submission that the term "serial killer" was a wholly inadequate description of McArthur, a 67-year-old landscape artist whose victims were primarily immigrants of Canadian descent. Middle East or Southeast Asia and members of Toronto's gay community. community.

"The certainty that Mr. McArthur will never be out of jail is a good result," said Harper. He argued that only Robert Pickton addresses McArthur's "deadly devastation" in the annals of Canadian criminal records.

During his argument, Harper stated that the Crown believed that a "measured" penalty of waiting 50 years before McArthur could apply for parole would be sufficient to bring justice to the victims of McArthur. Importantly, he added, this would address three main concerns about murder conviction: denunciation, deterrence and punishment.

Harper argued that the Canadian justice system had never met a murderer such as McArthur – a "badual predator," said Harper, who intimate moments took advantage of vulnerable individuals and violated the law. trust of people he knew, such as Kayhan, Kinsman and Mahmudi. order to kill them for no other reason than self-satisfaction.

McArthur, said Harper, continued to put the public at risk until the day of his arrest: January 18, 2018, when Toronto police officers who were watching McArthur saw him bring a Middle Eastern man in his appartment. Inside, the police found the man naked and handcuffed to McArthur's bed.

"(McArthur) was caught," said Harper. "He did not stop."

I spoke to my lawyer and I do not want to say anything

McArthur's defense counsel, James Miglin, admitted in his sentencing statement that his client's crimes were "horrible" and that McArthur's moral guilt was "exceptionally high." But he called the 50-year-old Crown's application for parole ineligibility "unduly harsh". The age and the fact that McArthur pleaded guilty helped to ensure that the case was settled more quickly than if it went to trial.

Miglin instead asked McMahon to opt for the 25-year minimum condition of parole ineligibility.

McArthur denied the opportunity to speak in court Tuesday, saying only to McMahon at the end of Miglin's remarks that "I spoke to my lawyer and I do not want to say anything".

The Court heard a total of 27 impact statements on Monday and Tuesday from family and friends of victims and members of the LGBTQ community. In their testimony, speakers exposed the full implications of McArthur's crimes – the sheer amount of ways in which his actions continue to ruin their lives day by day.

They suffer panic attacks. They have physical pain. They have trouble eating. They feel endangered and adrift, increasingly suspicious of people in their neighborhood and around the world. They are angry, sad, stressed, insomniac. They have nightmares and wake up sweaty. Sometimes they have trouble remembering the man they knew and loved without badociating these memories with pain and suffering.

Kirushnaveny Yasotharan, Kanagaratnam's sister, said, through a Crown attorney, that she was anxious, terribly angry and seriously depressed since her brother's disappearance. Her eyes were watering when she tried to fall asleep. She found herself preying on her three children, who do not understand the seriousness of her ordeal.

Among her emotions, there is the revenge she feels towards McArthur, who remained motionless for the second day in a row as the impact statements were read aloud aloud.

"I do not want to live in this world that has become terribly cruel," Yasotharan said.

The hearing will resume Friday, the date on which it is expected that McArthur will be sentenced.