VANCOUVER — A man accused of aggravated assault in a stabbing attack on three people at a Vancouver Chinatown festival has been found not criminally responsible due to a mental disorder.
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Eric Gottardi says the court doesn’t convict people of crimes for being sick.
The trial heard that Blair Donnelly had asked the Holy Spirit for a sign not to carry out the stabbings in September of 2023, but he didn’t get one and carried on with the attack because he “wanted to obey God.”
Gottardi says that Donnelly lacked the ability to rationally choose to commit the crime.
At trial, the lawyer for Donnelly said his client was overwhelmed and convinced in the belief that God wanted him to stab people, but Crown counsel argued the accused was capable at the time of knowing what he was doing was wrong.
Donnelly’s case is now being sent to the B.C. Review Board, which has jurisdiction over those found not criminally responsible, and it will make a determination on his case in 90 days.
The trial heard that Donnelly was on unescorted leave from the B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Hospital on the day of the attack.
He has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and that the psychiatrist who testified in the trial in September said his more recent diagnosis was “schizoaffective disorder bipolar type,” which manifests as religious delusions.
Donnelly has previously been found not criminally responsible for stabbing his daughter to death in 2006, and for a 2017 attack on another psychiatric patient with a butter knife.
