Killer gets a legal freebie for vicious prison attack

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This article was published 26/05/2012 (5110 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Colton Patchinose has killed three people in cold blood, seriously wounded three others and permanently disabled another man in a vicious jailhouse attack.

Yet Canadian law is powerless to impose any additional sanctions against Patchinose beyond the automatic sentence he would have received if there was just one murder victim instead of seven overall victims.

On Friday, Patchinose was sentenced to 12 years in prison for his role in the December 2009 incident at Milner Ridge. However, the penalty can only be served concurrent, not consecutive, to the existing life sentence he received for a March 2008 triple murder, meaning it will long since have expired once he is eligible for parole after serving 25 years behind bars.

In essence, it was a legal freebie — not unlike the concurrent life sentences he received for the other two people he gunned down inside the Alexander Avenue home, along with three other people who suffered life-threatening gunshot injuries.

Canadian law currently doesn’t allow for parole eligibility to be “stacked,” so a killer has the same eligibility regardless of the total body count. Plus, any further infractions committed along the way are simply rolled into the existing penalty, rather than added on.

The only hope for justice officials is that the National Parole Board will consider the sum of his crimes and make it that much harder to earn parole.

Jurors took only a few hours last year to find Patchinose guilty of three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of attempted murder for the house-party ambush. Patchinose opened fire, wrongly believing someone inside the home was responsible for an attack about 10 days earlier that left Patchinose suffering stab wounds.

Patchinose was convicted earlier this year of aggravated assault for the attack at Milner Ridge, which occurred while he was awaiting trial for the murders. The victim, Kent Wilson, suffered extensive head injuries. Jurors were told Wilson, 33, was being housed in a separate range of the prison from the attackers. He is diabetic and would be taken for daily insulin treatments, and would walk past the area where the attackers were housed.

“He would give them what we commonly refer to as the finger, or some other inappropriate gesture. I’m not here to say that was the most intelligent thing for Mr. Wilson to do,” said prosecutor Keith Eyrikson.

On the day of the attack, all of the accused were together inside the gym when Wilson passed by. Unfortunately, a guard at Milner Ridge had inadvertently hit a button that unlocked the room and allowed the accused to go charging after the victim. He only realized his mistake when it was too late. Wilson was knocked to the ground and repeatedly kicked in the head before guards could intervene.

A total of seven people have been convicted. John Young was sentenced Friday to 10 years, while three other accused were previously sentenced: Eugene Lacquette and Michael Lavallee to 10 years, Wilfred Cook to eight years. Two other accused remain to be sentenced.

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