Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Lunatics Among Us

One can only suppose that when the original mistrial of Allen Tehrankari took place, there wasn't time for his lawyer to assess his mental stability before he was summarily fired, a new trial called and Mr. Tehrankari insisted on defending himself. Since that time, throughout the court proceedings where this man defended himself against the first-degree murder charge laid against him, it seems clear that had a lawyer persuaded him to plead not guilty due to insanity it would be likely he would have been found not guilty due to a severe mental disability.

That, however, is not what occurred. And in all likelihood - this megalomaniac, accustomed to successfully manipulating people whose own hold on sound judgement and view of the world were previously severely impaired due to their intellectual limitations - would have refused to limit his options by declaring himself of unsound mind, so certain was he of his extraordinary capabilities to persuade people to trust in his fantastical idiocies.

After a life of crime, serving just punishment for offences against society, he discovered an extended family whose simple-minded trust in religious fundamentalism led them to believe his assertions of having found God, thanks to their caring ministrations. He could, thereafter, do no wrong, it would appear. And they were willing and eager to place their trust in him, rather than rally to the support of their sibling; eager to believe his febrile tales, and condemn her mores.

His own wife, Susan Pearce, chose to be obsequiously protective of him, iterating and reiterating the inane and genuinely imaginative albeit clumsy stories he invented to 'explain' away the incredible amount of incriminating evidence arrayed against this monster. Her brothers testified their belief that she was herself responsible for the horrible manner in which she lost her life, due to her lax morals.

"The trouble she was causing was going to cause her trouble. The ripple effect of her adultery and fornication - it was damaging peoples' lives", her brother Robert Pearce informed the trial jury. Barbara Galway herself expressed her disappointed at her family's unwillingness to understand her needs and come to her aid. "I seem to be getting support from everyone except from my own family (except for Allen)" she emailed another brother.

Her brothers felt she needed the help of a psychiatrist; it wasn't 'normal' for her, in the wake of the dissolution of her 27-year marriage, for her to seek out the company of men. They believed she was simultaneously seeing two men, and enjoying illicit sex with them; an unfathomable, condemnatory sin. In the face of their outspoken condemnation of her, she found some consolation in her 'understanding' brother-in-law.

Until it finally became obvious to her that his interest in her was not at all what she had taken it for; rather than a sibling-like concern for her, he was demonstrating an overt sexual interest that alarmed her, and caused her to mention her unease at his incessant attempts to connect with her. When it finally became clear to Tehrankari that Barbara Galway intended to confront him in front of his wife, his 'affection' for his sister-in-law turned deadly.

It was thanks to Barbara Galway's brothers' intervention that Allan Tehrankari was alerted. They approached both him and his wife to convey their conviction that their fast-and-loose sister meant to cause a rift between husband and wife. They were convinced their errant slut of a sister meant to seduce her brother-in-law. With that knowledge, Tehrankari began to plan how he would proceed.

His entrapping of his sister-in-law, followed by a beating, a rape, asphyxiation, and then the conveyance of her body to a forested area where a trail of blood left n the snow from the parking lot to the place where he doused her body with gasoline and set it afire was amply proven by the evidence presented in court. Barbara Galway's blood everywhere in the bathroom of the Tehrankari home, in the hallway, walls and door frames, their van and the mattress soaked through with her blood gave testimony to his unspeakable crime.

Neighbours testified to having seen him bundling a red-stained tarp, struggling with her corpse to remove it from the house, and neighbours testified they saw him tie the blood-soaked mattress on top of his vehicle. Vaginal swabs of the horribly burned corpse identified Tehrankari's DNA. A piece of the bloodied carpet he had removed was discovered in a neighbour's trash can, along with a purported note from Barbara Galway.

Yet Allen Tehrankari's religion-deranged in-laws felt compelled to continue charging their sister with a mentally disturbed state, handing out sexual favours to all comers, and developing a sexual fixation on her sister's husband. Their sister, Tehrankari's wife Susan, insisted that her husband's inanely fabricated stories of assault and semen extraction, his denial of implication in murder, were all reasonable and rational arguments.

When Justice Colin McKinnon, in receiving the verdict from the jury praised their service, empathizing with their having had to endure a "profound disruption in your lives", he must surely also have been alluding to their having had to sit and listen as a veritable madman sullied the very air they all breathed with his deranged charges. Not only his determination to insist the jury believe his stories fraught with madness, but his insistence that he was being framed.

His defence substantially revolved around his claims of forcible confinement, sexual humiliation, and victimhood at the hands of a cabal intent on murdering his sister-in-law. A dreadful event of which he was completely innocent, and of which the jury must exonerate him. Instead, they must believe that the man they were sitting in judgement of, was framed by "professionals"; police officers, the Crown, expert witnesses; all guilty, not he.

Justice McKinnon was grateful for the jury's findings of guilty of first-degree murder. The justice spoke of the murder of Barbara Galway as "venal, callous and brutal in the extreme... You disposed of her body as if it were a piece of filthy garbage. You robbed her sons of a loving mother, you betrayed the faith and trust of your devoted wife and precious child; you manipulated the goodwill of your wife's supportive family."

And then imposed upon him an automatic sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years from the time of his arrest. Sane people can only shake their heads at the witless connivance of innocent people in the moral obstruction of charging a murderer with a heinous criminal offence.

And hope and trust that the lunatic accusations and utterly bizarre story-telling in a court of law that proceeded with this case will never again be permitted to occur.

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