B.C. woman who stabbed social media foe in courtroom losses appeal of attempted murder sentence

A B.C. woman who tried to kill her long-time social media enemy in a Vancouver courtroom four years ago will have to stay in prison, the province’s court of appeal has ruled.

After a lengthy trial, Surrey’s Qin Shen was found guilty in 2023 of the attempted murder of Jing Lu two years earlier and sentenced to 12 years in prison. On appeal seeking a sentence reduction of six years, her lawyer argued the judge failed to consider how Shen’s existing mental illness fed that hate, making her not criminally responsible.

Justice Gail Dickson dismissed the appeal in a recently published decision.

Shen and the victim, Jing Lu, had met in 2005 through an online forum to connect Chinese immigrants in Canada. Over the ensuing years, the two “became entangled in an intense online feud in which they repeatedly posted insults and personal attacks on one another.”

So fierce was the hostility that Shen’s marriage fell apart, she gave up work and needed to see a psychiatrist for anxiety and depression.

In 2019, both were found liable in countering defamation suits, but Shen was ordered to pay $500 more in damages, plus an additional $2,000 for being found guilty of contempt of a court order not to post about her adversary.

Both parties appealed and Lu’s counsel put forward another contempt application, prompting Shen to ask for an in-person hearing on May 25, 2021.

During Shen’s trial, the court learned that she “took several preparatory steps” for her planned attack on Lu that day, including “including arming herself with a knife and hammer, drinking alcohol to bolster her courage, bringing a suitcase with her to court to either take to jail or flee after the attack, and dressing all in red to disguise the red blood stains.”

While waiting for the judge to appear and after making sure no one was close by, Shen attacked Lu from behind with the hammer and stabbed her at least ten 10 times with “a very sharp and narrow knife” before a sheriff’s officer was alerted and entered the courtroom to stop her.

According to Vancouver Is Awesome , ​Lu was taken to hospital with injuries to her head, a major vein, a lung and her heart.

In statements made to authorities after, a then-53-year-old Shen explained that Lu “had to die to stop her from continuing the feud between them.”

Shen’s lawyers wanted trial judge Kathryn Denhoff to rule her not criminally responsible by reason of mental disorder and her use of alcohol to cope, but a psychiatric witness found that although her mental state and the alcohol were factors, they “were not direct causative elements of the offences.”

Instead, the psychiatrist maintained that it was her enmity of Lu — driven by the belief that she was the victim, even after the attack — that “was the dominant factor driving her behaviour.”

Denhoff agreed and sentenced her to 12 years, leaving her with eight remaining after time served.

On appeal, her lawyers argued the trial judge erred by not fairly assessing Shen’s “moral culpability by failing to consider the extent to which her mental illness” fueled her hate of Lu.

Defence counsel said Shen’s disdain “grew and evolved as it did because she was experiencing the world through the lens of her illness, which he describes as ‘the soil within which the animus grew.”

Citing a case in which a man beat his mother to death and severely beat his wife while under the effects of alcohol, Shen’s lawyer also argued her mental illness contributed to the alcohol consumption that precipitated the attack.

Dickson, however, ruled that while Denhoff could have reasoned that Shen’s anathema for Lu was “linked to her depressive illness to a sufficient degree to reduce moral blameworthiness” for the attack, the judge made no error in acting on the evidence before her in applying the original sentence.

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