The Decibel - Catch and release: the revolving door of violent repeat offenders

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

In less than a decade, Mohammed Majidpour has racked up more than 30 offences in Vancouver. His crimes include theft, robbery, dangerous driving and numerous violent attacks on strangers. Recently, he pleaded guilty to his 11th assault on a stranger and, after spending almost a year in a pre-trial detention centre, was sentenced to a single day in prison. This is the 14th time he’s received a single-day prison sentence.Mike Hager is a reporter in The Globe’s B.C. bureau in Vancouver. He’s on the show to tell us how common Mohammed’s situation is in B.C. and why critics say it’s a symptom of deeper problems in the province’s corrections system.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

In Vancouver, a man named Mohamed Majidpour recently pled guilty to his 11th random assault on a stranger. For this offense, he received a sentence of just one day in prison. That's because he'd already spent almost a year in a detention center waiting for his trial. Mohamed's situation is a symptom of deeper problems in BC's corrections system, where violent offenders can be released and left to deal with chronic issues of addiction, mental health and homelessness. And in Mohammed's case, the judge found him likely to reoffend in a violent manner, if his substance use disorders and lack of housing weren't addressed.

Today, Mike Hager is on the show. He's a reporter in the Globe's B.C. Bureau in Vancouver. He'll tell us about this one offender and what experts say needs to change in B.C.'s justice system. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Mike, thank you so much for being here. No problem, Menaka. I love being on. I just want to start by asking you, who is Mohamed Majidpour? Well, he's a 36-year-old Vancouverite whose name politicians in BC frequently use as a shorthand for the way the justice system catches and releases chronic violent offenders. And he's kind of one of the hundreds of people just struggling on Vancouver streets as he battles, you know, substance use disorder and mental health problems. So he's a repeat offender here.

How many offenses has he had? He's had over 30 offenses in the past eight years. He's recently been convicted for another assault against a stranger. This one was an assault with a weapon. He's got six convictions for an assault with a weapon, two for assaults, three for threats, a weapon. He's got six convictions for an assault with a weapon, two for assaults, three for threats, a robbery. He also has 13 shoplifting convictions and a bunch of other nonviolent crimes. Okay. So a range of things, some which sound pretty serious and violent there. We are going to talk about that, Mike, but I guess let's just back up a little bit here.

Do we know anything about his life? How did he get to this point? Yeah. Well, I'd love to say I've been able to track him down for an interview to kind of understand him in his own words, but he's never responded while in jail to my requests, and it's been very difficult to find him once he's out. So we just have to piece together kind of a picture of his life through court records and what he's told psychiatrists while in jail and my interviews with his estranged family in Iran and the Philippines so his parents immigrated here from those two countries decades ago and they had Mohammed and a younger brother and sister and they raised them in the middle of Vancouver and gave them a somewhat you know normal childhood then the couple broke up when he them a somewhat normal childhood. Then the couple

broke up when he was a teenager and he returned to the Philippines just north of Manila with his mom and his other siblings. He returned to Vancouver alone at 20 and seemed set on becoming a pilot. Eventually that foundered. We don't know really why, but court recently heard that he first became addicted to opioids a couple of years later in his mid-20s after getting a prescription to help with the pain of an infection after dental surgery. Although a cousin I interviewed blames his downfall into addiction based on him reconnecting with some close childhood friends who had become gangsters in BC's lucrative drug trade. By 2014, he gets his first criminal charge, which is for stealing alcohol. Soon after, he has a charge for robbing someone and dangerous driving. And then the pattern kind of asserts

itself after that. His mental health was really suffering. He was misusing opioids and stimulants such as meth while sleeping outside in shelters. And it doesn't appear that he didn't over 30 offenses and 11 of those were random attacks on strangers, which are pretty scary offenses. Right. So I want to talk about one of his victims, Mike. This is Katie Nguyen-No. Can you tell me about about her and what happened? Sure. Over the course of my reporting, I've reached out to all his victims that are on the record. And really only Katie knew, you know, agreed to talk. And she agreed after being assaulted last September. She was walking to class downtown Vancouver. She's just started a hospitality degree at the local community college.

She's a student. She's a student. She was 19 at the time. Very calm, quiet woman. And she's walking down the street and Mr. Magipor is approaching her and he has a metal stick in his hand and he hits her over the head and is screaming at her to go back to China. Her parents came as refugees from Vietnam. So she was very shocked, and she got concussed in the attack. And just to be clear, they didn't know each other, right? This was random. No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, no. Just totally random, kind of trying to make her way past him, and he turned on her.

And then hours later, he lit a car on fire in a nearby Catholic church parking lot, and he was arrested for those two things and given bail very quickly. But then as soon as he was let out, two and a half hours later, he got caught boosting $330 worth of leggings from a downtown H&M. Two and a half hours later after he was released on bail. Yeah, and it's eye-catching headlines like that. That made a lot of news after his previous attacks. Wow. Ms. Nguyen-No is really had a tough go after that attack.

She said she had to drop a bunch of classes. She had motion sickness for months and concussion related symptoms. I talked to her recently and she said she turned the corner in April and was able to kind of return to kind of somewhat normalcy. But, you know, she still has to get to bed early. She needs a full night's sleep, she says, or else those symptoms kind of rear their head again. Mike, what kind of sentence did Muhammad get for assaulting Katie? Well, he was arrested after getting found shoplifting again. And so he was

in jail for nearly a year after that arrest. And he avoided trial in August by pleading guilty. And he was sentenced to one day in prison. You know, he's been in for almost a year. And so under Canadian law, he gets time and a half credit for that time behind bars. So it came out to just under 15 months, but he's got 14 specific conditions to follow over the next two years of probation, such as abstaining from any illicit drugs. And maybe we should just clarify, Mike, the difference between jail and prison, because I think a lot of people like myself think about these almost as the same thing, but they're different in this context. Could you just explain here? Yeah, for sure. And you write a long feature and the number of times I had to go back and, oh, was that jail or prison? It is confusing.

Jail in this instance is referring to kind of the pretrial centers they're held at. And those are pretty tumultuous places, you know, people cycling in and out of court. You have a lot of transient kind of people. And prison, of course, is the provincial prison system and the federal prison system, which is kind of, you know, more stationary and there's more programming. There's more services for offenders. So they are kind of striking the contrast often between those two streams. And critics are saying that people like Mr. Majidpour doing their time in pretrial centers and jails

doesn't really help them and the public in the end because they don't get the same range of services they would in a prison per se. Okay, so because he spent most of his time in jail, so in these pre-trial centers, he doesn't have access to the, I guess, range of services that he would in a prison? Yeah, that's the criticism experts are making of the current kind of approach. You know, there are some services, but, you know, BC Corrections admits that it is tough to have, you know, very comprehensive psychiatric counseling, for instance, because you don't know when someone will be called to trial. You don't know how long they'll be there. So it's tough to kind of schedule. But that being said, there is criticism of underfunding and lack of psychiatrists, for instance, able to attend to all the prisoners' needs behind bars at these pretrial jails. And Mike, this situation where Mohammed was sentenced to a day in prison after assaulting Katie, I mean, this isn't the first time that he's been sentenced to one day in prison, right? How many times now has this happened?

Yeah, he's now been sentenced to 14 one-day sentences. And it is pretty common for repeat offenders, chronic offenders, even violent offenders, to have their cases adjourned to the point where, you know, the appropriate time behind bars, according to case law, has already been served. Yeah. What did Katie have to say about that? Because she was the victim here. And to hear this person only gets a day in prison, what did she think about that? Katie, she didn't question it. She's very trusting of the system. She had been appearing at every one of his hearings, but she dialed in for this sentencing. And, you know, she was kind of buoyed by him appearing to put on weight and he seemed much healthier.

He was on methadone at the time. And, you know, mostly she just she just really wants to move on with her life. We'll be right back. Okay, so we've been talking about one man situation, Mike, but it sounds like this is not the only person this is happening to, right? So how common is it that repeat offenders like Mohammed would only get a sentence of one day in prison? Yeah, it's very tough to track because his case doesn't show up in the main legal databases. Why not? Because it's a lower level case in the eyes of the judicial system. So it is very tough to track and there are no good numbers. And so we don't really know how many people are, you people are repeatedly assaulting strangers

on the streets of BC. A group of mayors last year pushed the province to act on the issue when they got their local police forces to isolate and try and run their local data on who may be making up the bulk of these offenses. And these mayors estimated there could be maybe 200 or more folks across the province like Mr. Majidpour. So we're in this situation where they are maybe committing crimes and then getting one day in prison and then getting released again, essentially. Yes. And the latest release was typical too for Mr. Majidpour because he was released to a homeless shelter and not driven there, not sent there, but told show up by six and you can get a room. And we don't know if he ever showed up. Five days after he was released on probation, he allegedly breached the conditions by not showing up to his probation officer's

appointment. And so that's a common theme to half a dozen times he has failed to adhere to the conditions set out by the court. So critics are saying, yes, the one day prison sentence, which is just a nominal sentence, isn't helping them because they're not getting the services. And then the conditions placed on these people who are facing these three crises, homelessness, complex mental health issues, and addiction, they're just unable to follow these conditions. And so the system in place basically puts the onus on them to basically keep the peace and follow a host of conditions meant to improve their lives and protect the public. And just to be clear, when we're talking about a few hundred, these are specifically individuals who have assaulted random strangers and are caught up in this catch and release cycle, as some people call it. Yeah, it's a few hundred in a province of five million or so.

So it's a tiny number of people, but they certainly need a lot of help and take up a ton of resources. What is going on in BC that allows this to happen? Do we have any sense of this? Yeah. I mean, BC appears to be kind of unique with this uptick in violent crime against strangers. The main issues are threefold, how the courts are approaching these offenses. And then the root causes are a lack of affordable housing and a lack of free mental health and addiction services. Okay, so Mike, you mentioned three things that are kind of at the heart of this, right? So the court system, then a lack of mental health services, and housing as well being an issue. So let's kind of break these down.

I actually want to start with mental health services. So, I mean, in the case of Muhammad, I guess, why does he keep ending up back in detention centers, in jail, prison, instead of being treated and helped for his drug addiction, mental health issues? Like, are there those options available? It's very tough. He basically has been getting methadone treatment while awaiting trial. So he's offered that. But then, of course, he's released to the downtown east side. And over the course of the last eight years or so, has been unable to stop using.

It can be controversial, but is there a possibility for the court to mandate him to get this treatment or to go to a facility to get to this treatment? Is that a possibility? Well, that is kind of the front end of the debate now in the province. People can be forced to go to treatment to become well enough to stand trial, or if they meet a high bar of basically being not criminally responsible in the moment of the commission of the crime. Other than that, you can't force someone into treatment. And he most recently in the summer said he would not agree to live at a treatment facility. So people are really grappling with this question, what do you do for someone like him?

And these two experts hired by the province last year recommended BC adopt a system like Britain, where someone who is accused of a crime with complex mental health issues and a risk of harming others can be diverted to a hospital for care. And if none of that treatment works and they're still kind of reticent, then against their will, they could be sent to a low kind of secure unit. So it would be a new type of specialized mental health facility. Mike, another one of the factors that you mentioned here, the three factors, was housing, a lack of housing being an issue here. So what do experts say about how that complicates matters for these repeat offenders? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of common sense, but if you are homeless, you are pretty focused on surviving on the street, right?

You're less able to heal those other problems you're dealing with. And so when people are on bail or probation and are on the streets, it's really difficult to even find them. I was talking to a psychiatrist who works with the courts downtown and he said the most valuable person on their team is the outreach worker who knows every nook and cranny of the downtown east side and can actually go find their clients when they're in the wind, so to speak. So, you know, having a house is a central component to improving the public safety by putting folks under a roof and knowing where they are so they can be given services and better monitored as well. It's very important. Okay, Mike, the third factor you mentioned there was the system itself, the court system, the overwhelmed justice system here. Tell me what experts are saying about that and how this factors in. Yeah, I mean, prosecutors themselves say that they're just drowning in the amount of evidence that they must disclose to defense. There's a landmark ruling in Canada called Stinchcomb. I won't get into the nitty gritty. That's my white whale is to kind of unpack that for readers. But for something as

simple as a shoplifting case, it used to just involve, you know, typing up a two page summary of the available evidence and then going to court. Now that involves analyzing extensive security camera footage, transcribing that and all sorts of other media. So that just gives you a window into kind of what they're dealing with. At the same time, the Supreme Court of Canada has decided that in a case known as Jordan, that trials must begin with a year and a half of charges being laid. So prosecutors who have said they've been underfunded for years and are all overworked are really struggling to move these cases along. And often, you know, we saw Mr. Majidpour's adjourned, adjourned, adjourned. I'd show up to court and then adjourned again. And by the end of those adjournments,

the time is served according to kind of the precedents. Just lastly here, Mike, there was a report released last September with 28 recommendations to address the issue with repeat offenders. And one of the recommendations was to create special teams to essentially monitor these repeat offenders. How is that working and where do we go from there? Yeah, that was one of the most high profile recommendations and one that the government embraced right away. There was a pilot project in 2008 to 2012 where these groups of prosecutors solely focused on chronic repeat violent offenders and they had some success, it seems. And so now they've rebooted that. And there are teams, they wanted to hire 40 new Crown counsel to run these teams in concert with police and probation officers to better craft the punishment for these repeat violent offenders, but also protect the public better through monitoring and stepping up kind of the services. But these teams are supposed to give a much higher level of scrutiny and care

to repeat offenders. Mike, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. No problem. Thanks again, Mainika. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show.

Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.