Judge wrongly ordered weapons ban, court rules

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This article was published 15/02/2024 (609 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba’s highest court has overturned a weapons ban applied to a woman found not criminally responsible for killing her husband in 2018 while she was having schizophrenic delusions.

“The weapons prohibition order should be vacated,” wrote the Manitoba Court of Appeal in a Feb. 5 decision. “All other terms of the judgment remain unchanged.”

Both the Crown and defence were mistakenly under the impression that a weapons ban against 79-year-old Anne-Dore Maria Scheppner was mandatory.

Last October, Court of King’s Bench Justice Brenda Keyser gave Anne-Dore Scheppner a 10-year weapons prohibition order, after concluding she wasn’t criminally responsible for repeatedly stabbing her husband of 53 years in their Henderson Highway apartment in July 2018.

Scheppner, who had been charged with second-degree murder in the death of 85-year-old Hans George Scheppner, was held at the Selkirk Mental Health Centre.

She was only found fit to stand trial in May 2023, at which time the court agreed to a defence request for a psychiatric assessment.

Anne-Dore Scheppner has schizophrenia and was experiencing delusions of “mistreatment and persecution at the hands of Hans,” psychiatrist Dr. Eric Johnson told court last year.

Johnson said at the time that he ruled out any “non-psychotic motives” for the killing and found Anne-Dore Scheppner had suffered from “persecutory belief systems, with respect to her husband.”

She believed she was receiving messages from the radio and certain songs and planned to move to British Columbia and marry another man, Johnson told court.

In a joint submission to the Manitoba Court of Appeal, Crown prosecutor Manoja Moorthy and defence lawyer Gregory Hawrysh said Keyser had made an error by banning Anne-Dore Scheppner from possessing weapons, because she hadn’t been convicted or discharged of a criminal offence, but rather, was found not responsible.

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca