Court rejects killer’s self-defence claim

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This article was published 09/02/2019 (2656 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE province’s highest court has rejected a killer’s argument that he was either acting in self-defence or was intoxicated when a woman was stabbed.

In a unanimous verdict, the Manitoba Court of Appeal dismissed Michael Bourget’s appeal of his second-degree murder conviction for the slaying of Jenilee Ballantyne, 22, in January 2013.

In a four-page written decision released on Friday, Justice Chris Mainella wrote that the court rejected Bourget’s argument “the verdict was unreasonable because of self-defence, provocation or advanced intoxication.

“It was reasonably open for the judge, on the sum of the evidence, to find that the accused was the aggressor with the knife, not the victim as he claimed… and that there was no wrongful act or insult sufficient to deprive an ordinary person of the power of self-control.”

The court noted several factors: the victim had several defensive wounds, Bourget had told his roommate’s girlfriend the victim was “driving him so crazy that he could stab her,” and he had purposefully emptied a hockey bag and stuffed the body into it before putting the bag into his trunk of his car, driving away and abandoning the vehicle on a street in St. Vital.

Justices Diana Cameron and William Burnett agreed with the decision.

Bourget was convicted of second-degree murder by Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Gerald Chartier in 2017 and was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 11 years.

Bourget had testified that Ballantyne suddenly came at him with a knife after a night of sex, drugs and alcohol. He said he grabbed it away from her before stabbing her.

The court was told the victim was stabbed five times in the neck and it took from 15 minutes to around two hours for her to bleed to death.

— Kevin Rollason