(file photo)

By Susan McNeil

Dangerous offender

Appeal court denies dangerous offender status for Montreal Lake shooter

Mar 31, 2023 | 9:00 AM

A man who shot three rounds through the walls of a house in Montreal Lake while unlawfully at large, hitting one person in the leg, does not meet the criteria of a dangerous offender, the Court of Appeal has ruled.

The original trial judge who found Gene Arthur Bird to be a long term offender, but declined to declare him a dangerous offender (which would mean an indeterminate time in jail), made the correct decision, wrote Justice Kalmakoff.

“The designation stage of a dangerous offender proceeding is concerned with evaluating the offender’s future threat to public safety. The question is whether the offender will continue to be a real and present danger to the public,” Kalmakoff said in a written decision released two days ago.

When it appealed the original judge’s decision to not grant the dangerous offender designation, the Crown said three errors were made; there was a failure to assess the risk of future violent offences, the judge failed to consider the evidence in its totality and third, the trial judge misinterpreted the related part of the Criminal Code.

In the eight or nine months leading up to his trial, Bird was incarcerated at the Prince Albert Correctional Centre where he said he began to turn his life around and took part in faith-based addiction programming and abstained from drugs and alcohol.

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“Nor, in my view, does the need to be informed by past behaviour preclude a sentencing judge from finding that an offender has made changes that bode well for the future, or from accepting evidence about more hopeful prospects going forward, even in the face of damning evidence concerning the offender’s past,” Kalmakoff wrote.

Bird’s has a history of repeated violent offences, some while sober and some while under the influence of substances. His criminal history started as a youth.

In the shooting incident in Montreal Lake, Bird had first been walking around the community on January 2, 2017, armed with a .22 calibre rifle looking for his girlfriend whom he found in a home with another man.

The man left the house later, bleeding. It was after that, that Bird walked towards a second house and fired several rounds into it, hitting an adult inside in the leg.

However, the house was occupied by three adults and five children aged one to 14.

At the time, he was out of jail on statutory release with the condition that he live at a facility in Saskatoon. He left the facility six weeks after his release and never went back.

As a boy, Bird moved back and forth between Montreal Lake and Prince Albert with his family, suffering abuse and neglect in that time. He started drinking and smoking pot at ages six or seven, was huffing gas at eight years old and was using crack and meth as a teen.

His criminal history started when he was 12 and by the time he turned 28 and was responsible for the house shooting, he has been sentenced 21 times for over 70 criminal offences. Of those, 22 involved violence or weapons and range from assault with a weapon, robbery, sexual assault, assaulting a police officer and having unauthorized guns.

However, in the time leading up to his most recent offences, he has managed to stay sober, find a job and start a relationship. It changed when he visited Montreal Lake, his sister was murdered and his mother died, the decision reads.

The trial judge considered Bird’s history but rightly also looked at his recent time in custody where his behaviour improved, and he was given responsibilities in prison.

The appeal court judge said that just because an argument could be made that the trial judge misapplied the legal test for dangerous offender status, did not give the higher court the right to intervene.

“…this Court cannot intervene simply because it might have taken a different view of the evidence. As I have stated several times already, appellate interference with a factual conclusion such as the one at issue here is permissible only where that factual conclusion is the product of an error of law. I can see no such error here,” the judgement concluded.

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susan.mcneil@pattisonmedia.com