Guilty pleas for 1st-degree murder rare, legal experts say after sentencing of Ottawa family's killer
CBC
A 20-year-old man pleading guilty to four counts of first-degree murder is an extremely rare event that highlights the horrific nature of the mass stabbing he perpetrated in Ottawa last year, legal experts have told CBC.
Sri Lankan international student Febrio De Zoysa killed six people including four children in their Barrhaven home last March.
Last week he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder of Inuka Wickramasinghe, 7; Ashwini Wickramasinghe, 4; Ranaya Wickramasinghe, 3; and Gamini Amarakoon, 40, a close family friend and one of the family's two tenants.
De Zoysa pleaded down two counts to the lesser offence of second-degree murder of mother Darshani Ekanayake, 35, and her two-month-old baby Kelly Wickramasinghe. He pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of Dhanushka Wickramasinghe, the father and sole survivor.
The fact that De Zoysa pleaded guilty to first-degree murder was notable, according to Mark Ertel, a criminal lawyer not involved with the case.
"The most common reaction to a first-degree murder charge, even when there's a strong Crown case, would be to defend the case unless some lesser plea was offered," said Ertel, a partner at Ottawa law firm Bayne Sellar Ertel Macrae.
"It looks like it was an overwhelming case," Ertel told CBC.
"The role of defence counsel is always to attempt to get the best possible outcome for their client," he said. "In this case, the best possible outcome was probably to not put everyone through a trial and to just take the penalty which was inevitably going to be given, which is a life sentence."
First-degree murder carries an automatic sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole for 25 years.
While about 90 per cent of all criminal cases are resolved by negotiated agreement without going to trial, it is unusual for a defendant to plead guilty to the most serious charge, according to University of Ottawa professor Jennifer Quaid.
"In this case, it may just be that, that there really wasn't any other conclusion you could come to based on the evidence," she said. "The crimes are horrific — I think there's no other way to describe them."
De Zoysa, who had been boarding with the family, told the court he planned to kill everyone in the household because he had run out of money and didn't want to return to Sri Lanka when his international student visa expired.
The Wickramasinghe family had "been nothing but good to [him]," he told investigators.
Speaking outside court on Thursday, Crown prosecutor Dallas Mack said De Zoysa’s plea "recognizes his acceptance of the inevitable: his guilt."
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