Texas border guard Ramon Vargas Jr. was on patrol in the valley that forms the state’s southernmost tip on May 15, 2007, when a radio call warned him that a motion sensor had gone off by the river. Someone was near the border.

It was after 9 a.m. and already hot when Vargas steered his car toward the Rio Grande, a winding waterway that separates the U.S. from Mexico. Nearing the river, Vargas spotted a man — young, white, roughly five-foot-nine and 160 pounds, with brown hair and a scruffy beard, carrying a duffel bag on one shoulder and a backpack on the other.

The border guard didn’t know it yet, but the lone stranger had travelled nearly 5,000 kilometres over six days, from Canada’s east coast to the edge of Mexico, and he had been on a killing spree.

Vargas got out of his car and asked the man what he was doing.

“Just walking around,” the man replied, calm and polite.

Vargas asked for identification and the man handed him a Canadian driver’s licence, which said that he was Glen Race, age 26, of Nova Scotia. The border guard looked at the ID, and then back at Race. He asked for a passport. Race said yes, he had one, and dropped his duffel bag to the ground like he was going to retrieve it. But as Race pulled the bag open, Vargas saw the stock of a rifle.

The border guard ordered Race to step back and place his hands on the patrol vehicle. Instead, the fugitive lunged for Vargas’s service weapon, grabbing the gun with his left hand as Vargas held on with his right. In the struggle, Race sank his teeth into the border guard’s thumb and the side of his face. Still, Vargas managed to wrestle him to the ground. “Freeze or I’ll kill you,” Vargas said as he freed the weapon from his attacker’s grip. Lying in the dirt on his stomach, Race obeyed.

As backup arrived, investigators who examined Race’s belongings found the loaded rifle, ammunition, a kitchen knife, camouflage makeup, a balaclava, 370 Mexican pesos and balloons meant to keep bags afloat. They also found a driver’s licence for a Trevor Charles Brewster of Nova Scotia, whose body had been discovered under a wharf in Halifax on May 9, and a credit card in the name of Darcy Manor, who had been shot dead outside a hunting lodge in Clinton County, N.Y., on May 10.

In custody, Race kept his eyes squeezed shut. His body went rigid. He would not respond to questions or commands. Border officials had to coach him into a patrol vehicle. He repeated the phrase “walking in circles,” over and over. Later, in jail, correctional officers noted that he often appeared to be fighting imaginary people in his cell.

Race had been battling serious mental illness since his early 20s. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he had been committed to psychiatric hospitals on at least four occasions in Nova Scotia. His family had tried desperately to get him help, but nothing worked. Race lacked insight into his illness — a hallmark symptom of the disease — and did not accept that he was sick and needed treatment. Psychosis made him believe the world was inhabited by vampires and demons, and that he had been sent by God on a mission to purify the Earth.

In Canada, he would be found not criminally responsible in the killings of two Halifax men — including Brewster — after four psychiatric experts concluded that Race’s mental illness made him incapable of appreciating that his actions were morally wrong. Had his crimes been contained to Canada, he would have been sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment, where the goal would have been to rehabilitate him so that one day, if his mental health improved and he no longer posed a risk to the public, he might be released.

But by the time a Nova Scotia judge delivered his verdict, Race’s fate had already been sealed in a courtroom in upstate New York. Given a life sentence with no chance of parole, Race would find himself at Attica Correctional Facility, one of America’s most notorious prisons. The U.S. district attorney who prosecuted the case told local reporters after the verdict that if he could have sought the death penalty, he would have.

Race’s parents, brother and Halifax lawyer, Joel Pink, have long believed that he did not receive a fair trial in New York, and now the family is fighting to have his case heard again. Pink says that what happened in the U.S. courtroom never would have taken place on this side of the border — a view shared by many legal experts consulted for this story.

“It is my opinion that there was a miscarriage of justice,” Pink says. “I’m disturbed about what happened there.”

Mark and Donna Race, Glen’s parents, along with their younger son, Doug, are planning to mount an appeal that alleges Glen was not adequately represented by his court-appointed lawyer. But Pink says the judge, the prosecution and the defence attorney are all to blame for the unfair trial.

Why was Glen Race guilty in America, but not in Canada? On paper, the laws that govern mentally disordered accused in this country and in the state of New York are nearly identical pieces of legislation that evolved out of the same precedent-setting 1843 British ruling. But the Glen Race story — told in full here for the first time through court records, accounts from his family and an exclusive interview with Race — shows how a person found legally insane on one side of the border can be deemed perfectly culpable on the other.

When Mark Race saw two men in suits standing on his porch, he figured whatever they had to say couldn’t be good. So as he greeted the strangers, Mark stepped outside and closed the door, leaving his wife, Donna Race, in the kitchen.

It was May 15, 2007, near suppertime. Mark, then 56, and Donna, 57, lived in a small yellow bungalow on a rural road next to an apple orchard in Windsor, N.S., roughly an hour outside of Halifax.

They had moved from the city two years before, hoping a quiet life might help their son, Glen, clear his mind. But the plan hadn’t worked. Glen’s mental health had deteriorated, and now his father feared that the men, who introduced themselves as police detectives, were there to tell him something bad had happened — that his son had been hurt.

“What’s going on?” Mark asked.

Donna, a small woman, frail in body and increasingly frail in spirit, watched from the kitchen window. She and Mark had been married for nearly three decades, and none of their years together had been as challenging as the last six, during which their first-born son had morphed into someone they didn’t recognize.

Outside, the detectives asked Mark if he had heard about the killings of two Halifax men, Paul Knott and Trevor Brewster. Mark said yes, he had seen it on the news.

When they told him Glen was a suspect, Mark, a serious man whose broad six-foot-two frame filled the doorway, felt as though he had been drained of all emotion. Stunned, he went inside to tell his wife. The detectives followed.

Though tears came easily to Donna, she kept it together during the police visit. The parents sat at the kitchen table — inwardly devastated, outwardly numb — answering questions as best they could. Later, Donna would run through every decision she had made since Glen became ill, trying to identify what she could have done differently.

Donna, a grocery store cashier, and Mark, a retired power plant supervisor, had started their family in the 1980s in Mount Uniacke, a small community near Halifax where they lived in a home with a backyard that had a tree house and tire swing for their two boys. They later moved to the city, settling in Dartmouth.

Born on March 5, 1981, Glen was intelligent, driven and competitive. Doug, three years younger, was more popular and athletic, but the brothers were close. The boys had chores and paper routes. The family spent summers camping in a hardtop trailer at Kejimkujik National Park, where Glen, goofing around one day in a canoe, famously tipped his brother, father and himself into the lake.

Glen’s mental deterioration began in the fall of 2000, during his second year in Dalhousie University’s engineering program, following a period of heavy drug use and a stint abroad teaching English in Taiwan. His decline is documented in court records and etched in his parents’ memory. In third year, Glen dropped out of school and moved back in with his mother and father. At home, he locked himself in the basement, cutting off the telephone, lights and television, and consuming only small amounts of food and water, telling Mark and Donna that he needed to cleanse himself. He lost 40 pounds in two months.

Glen was first admitted to hospital in November 2001. There would be many more involuntary admissions initiated by his desperate parents, and at least five escapes documented in medical records.

Schizophrenia can be managed with medication and therapy, and many who receive the diagnosis go on to lead ordinary lives. But for some, getting and staying well is much more difficult. Glen did not believe he was sick. He did not trust doctors and blamed his parents for his institutionalization. He considered his time in hospital a form of “spiritual rape.”

After one hospital stay, Glen stopped going out, gave up showering and did not brush his teeth for more than a year. He began to eat excessively, gorging himself to the point of physical pain. He developed a belief in vampires and demons. He told his family he was being attacked through the astral plane and that holding his breath would protect him. He became obsessed with purification, emerging one night from his bedroom having painted everything in it white — the walls, the furniture, a bible, and himself. He punched holes in the walls, smashed stereo equipment and slept with a knife.

In 2005, Glen left home intending to walk to Mexico and live off the land, but was arrested in Nova Scotia after he broke into a cabin in the woods. A psychiatrist who assessed him warned that “the potential for ... increased risk for violence is there despite the lack of past charges.”

Later that year, Glen was taken to hospital with second-degree burns after he set himself on fire in his parents’ backyard. He appeared to improve, briefly, during a hospital stay in 2006 when he was on clozapine, a drug that has been successful in managing severe schizophrenia. But it didn’t last. By January 2007, Glen had stopped taking his meds again.

In the months before the two detectives appeared at their door, Donna and Mark had watched their son spread salt around the house to ward off evil. They had watched him leave food outside to feed the trees and spirits. They had watched him meditate while holding a knife. Glen told his mother that he had the power to forgive sin, but he never would.

In early May, Glen moved into a rental apartment in downtown Halifax, his first time living independently in years.His parents were worried about the change, but felt they had to support him. Mark had driven Glen back to his apartment after a visit on May 7, having no idea that his son had already killed one man and was about to kill another.

On May 1, 2007, Glen Race spent the day at his new apartment in the north end of Halifax. He ran errands, taking out books on Mexico and Belize from the library and withdrawing cash from his bank account, according to court records that documented his activity that day and in the weeks that followed. He would later tell doctors that he had been summoned by God to wage war on demons and cleanse the world of sin.

That afternoon, Paul Knott, 44, a retired navy cook who had served overseas, was shopping with his 17-year-old daughter, Jennifer. As evening approached, Knott dropped Jennifer off at work, kissed her goodbye, and told her he would see her at home later.

Sometime that night, Knott and Race crossed paths on Citadel Hill in downtown Halifax, a military fort and national historicsite that is a known meeting place for gay men. Both Knott and Race’s second victim were gay, but early theories that the killings were motivated by hate would be dismissed after extensive psychiatric evaluation. Race told doctors later that he chose the men because they were easy targets. (The victims’ families declined or did not respond to interview requests for this story.)

Knott was attacked inside his blue Chevrolet Malibu. Race slashed his throat and stabbed him in the thigh, chest and neck. He told doctors that Knott was a demon who he had asked to repent for his sins. Afterward, Race dumped his body in an overgrown path in a remote wooded area 60 kilometres outside of Halifax. Police would find a knife bearing Race’s fingerprints lodged between the driver’s seat and the centre console.

The next day, Race drove Knott’s car to a Halifax convenience store, where a clerk noted that Race appeared to be avoiding the security cameras, and to a Walmart, where he purchased another large knife.

That night, after removing the Malibu’s licence plate and covering its blood-soaked back seat with a tarp, Race abandoned the car on a dirt road near Halifax International Airport. He rode his bicycle, which he had stored in the trunk, to a nearby gas station, and phoned his father to pick him up.

Driving to Windsor, Mark noticed his son was holding his breath for long periods of time. At home, Glen asked his father to hose down the family truck and his bicycle. He spent most of the next few days with his parents, who recall that he carried a knife around the house and sat on the patio steps jerking his head and arguing with an invisible person. They had no idea what he had done.

On May 7, Mark drove Glen back to Halifax. Later, the parents noticed that their son had cut himself out of a family photograph.

Across town that same evening, Trevor Brewster, 45, was working a shift at Steak and Stein, a well-known family restaurant where he had been employed for 24 years, primarily as a server. It was Brewster’s first day back after a vacation in the Dominican Republic. He had made plans to visit a friend after work, but didn’t show up.

Sometime that night, Brewster crossed paths with Race at Frenchman Lake in nearby Dartmouth. Race told psychiatrists later that he struck Brewster in the head with a metal bar, ordered him to repent for his sins and slashed his throat. Race hid Brewster’s battered body under a wharf and took off in the victim’s black Honda Civic. He said later that the Archangel Michael told him to flee.

At 1:30 a.m., Race screeched his tires while passing through a Dartmouth intersection and drew the attention of two RCMP officers, who pursued in a patrol vehicle. Seeing flashing lights behind him, Race sped up. The officers, not wanting to endanger the public with a high-speed chase, recorded the car’s licence plate number and backed off. Race saw this as a sign that the Virgin Mary had intervened to instigate their retreat.

An hour later, Race passed through a toll station into New Brunswick, where he asked an attendant how to get to the U.S. border. He stopped briefly at a monastery that morning, where staff would not let him in but saw him wash himself and Brewster’s car, and then sit for a while in a towel in the parking lot.

The following day, May 9, he attempted to withdraw cash from an ATM near Montreal. Later that night, he hid and abandoned the Honda on an old logging road a few kilometres north of the U.S. border in Havelock, Que., and continued on foot.

On May 10, on a quiet rural road in the township of Mooers, in Clinton County, N.Y., local resident Marjorie Rushford spotted an unfamiliar man near the end of her driveway, wearing hiking boots and carrying a map and compass. Race told Rushford he was out for a walk. After they parted, he continued into the woods and broke into a hunting lodge through an open window.

Soon after, Darcy Manor, 35, a local mechanic, school bus driver and father of two, parked his 1992 Ford F-250 pickup truck outside the lodge. He had been asked by the owner to prepare an outdoor water pump for spring.

From inside the lodge, Race watched Manor kneel and lean over the pump. Then he grabbed a rifle from a nearby shelf and fired a single shot through the kitchen window. It struck Manor in the lower back and tore through his lungs, killing him. Race told doctors later that he believed Manor’s appearance at the lodge was “pre-arranged,” and that because he was a “demon slayer” and “a superior spiritual being,” laws did not apply to him.

Race tied the victim to an all-terrain vehicle and dragged his body down a nearby trail. Then he drove away in Manor’s truck.

By the next afternoon, Race had passed through half a dozen states and covered 1,760 kilometres. In Dalton, Ga., he stole a South Dakota licence plate from a parked vehicle and used it to replace the one on Manor’s truck. He changed plates again the next day at a farm in Vinton, La., and later in Sabine Pass, Texas.

A flat tire stalled him on May 14 in Baytown, Texas, where he abandoned the Ford, walked to a truck stop and purchased a bus ticket.

By the next morning, he was in a taxi on his way to the Mexican border. “Be careful,” the driver told him. “They make their own laws in Mexico.”

Though Race wouldn’t reach his destination, the border arrest didn’t make his journey any less astonishing. He managed to travel nearly 5,000 kilometres while evading authorities in two countries for two weeks — a feat that would cast doubt on claims that he did not have the mental capacity to form criminal intent.

Race had a documented history of serious mental illness, but would it be enough to mount an insanity defence not only in Canada, but in the U.S.? Two forensic psychiatrists hired by his defence team to assess him believed so. But they would never get to testify in New York.

The U.S. murder trial was held at the Clinton County courthouse in Plattsburgh, N.Y., a roughly 45-minute drive from the hunting lodge where Darcy Manor was killed.

On day one, Sept. 8, 2008, a leaner and long-haired Glen Race sat with his lawyer at the counsel table wearing a baggy brown suit. His parents and brother were stationed behind him in the public gallery, but most of the courtroom seats were filled with local reporters and the family and friends of Manor, who had been a lifelong resident of the largely rural county of 81,000 people.

The jury box was empty, reflecting the defence decision to go with a judge-alone trial. Mark McCormick, Glen’s court-appointed lawyer, was a 37-year-old attorney who had resigned from his post as public defender in a neighbouring county the year before to “pursue other interests,” according to a local newspaper report. He had since gone into private practice and took on the Race case by special assignment from Clinton County, which didn’t have its own public defender.

Clinton County district attorney Andrew Wylie was the prosecutor. Wylie, a former criminal defence lawyer with the intensity of a college football coach, was a father of five in his mid-40s, married to a Catholic school teacher. He had been elected as the county’s top law enforcement official three years before. This was arguably the biggest case of his career so far.

Everyone in the courtroom expected Race to plead not responsible by reason of mental disease, or, as the defence is more commonly called in New York, not guilty by reason of insanity. Months earlier, a defence psychiatrist had concluded that Race’s actions were motivated by delusions that led him to believe he was a godlike figure on a mission to rid the world of evil. McCormick had provided that expert report to the state, as required by law when an accused intends to plead insanity, and Wylie, in turn, had hired his own expert to assess Race.

But as the trial began, Wylie, in a tense and lengthy discussion in court before opening arguments, admitted that the state’s expert report was not complete. McCormick would only receive it four days into the trial.

Even so, Wylie balked when he learned that McCormick also owed him a report from a second defence expert who had assessed Race, and expressed concern about being “blindsided” by new information. “We’re starting a trial,” Wylie complained.

But it was McCormick who would be blindsided. Wylie had another surprise for the defence that morning: fresh evidence. The prosecutor presented McCormick with a package of 27 CDs containing recordings of jailhouse telephone calls between Race and his family. Inmates are warned that calls are subject to surveillance, so the recordings were legal.

Only later would McCormick learn that the state’s expert witness, Dr. Angela Hegarty, had relied upon the wiretaps to form an opinion that Glen was “malingering,” or faking the symptoms of his illness. For now, McCormick asked the Race family to hold onto the CDs, and he did not immediately review their contents or send them to his own experts for analysis.

Those who looked back at the case later would question whether McCormick had a clear trial strategy. He had not prepared a formal witness list, and he began the trial with a request to delay his opening arguments until after the prosecution rested its case, a move that suggested he had not decided exactly what the defence would be. When the judge denied his request, McCormick waived his right to summarize his case.

On day two, Race, in a conference in Judge Kevin Ryan’s chambers, tried to fire McCormick and represent himself. Race spoke in rambling, unending sentences — he had not been on medication for more than a year — but was clear that he felt McCormick’s representation was inadequate. Ryan denied the request, noting that Race had already dismissed his first lawyer and insisting McCormick was “one of the very best” and was doing an “excellent, excellent” job.

Wylie presented the state’s case over eight days in September. The evidence that Race killed Darcy Manor was circumstantial, but overwhelming. Multiple witnesses placed Race near the scene in the hour before Manor was killed, and Race had been arrested in Texas carrying Manor’s credit card and the murder weapon. The state rested on a Wednesday, and the defence was scheduled to begin its case the following Monday.

That Monday morning, Sept. 22, McCormick filed a surprise motion seeking a continuation — a delay in the trial of an unspecified length — to give his two psychiatric experts an opportunity to listen to the wiretaps that Hegarty, the state psychiatrist, had relied upon in her report. During the weekend break, McCormick had listened to some of the recordings and spoken to his experts. He said they would not be able to weigh in on Hegarty’s conclusions without more time.

“Short of a mistrial, it appears that a continuance is the only manner in which Mr. Race is to receive a fair trial under the circumstances,” he wrote to the judge.

Wylie was aghast that McCormick had not reviewed the new evidence or shared it with his experts sooner. “You’ve had every opportunity from September 8th until today to listen to (the wiretaps) at night, on your way (to and from court) ...” he argued in court. “Two weeks is plenty sufficient.”

McCormick said he simply hadn’t had time, in the middle of a trial, to review the material. Neither Wylie nor McCormick knew how many hours of tape the CDs contained, but the calls had been recorded over 15 months.

McCormick told Judge Ryan that he couldn’t call his experts to testify without a continuance. The judge disagreed, arguing they could at least speak to the conclusions drawn in their own reports, and ruled against the motion. “I do conclude that the defence has had these materials for two weeks, that’s not in doubt, and I do believe that’s under the facts of the case sufficient time,” Ryan said.

When the trial continued two days later, McCormick had a new plan: he dropped the insanity defence and instead prepared to argue that the state had not proven his client committed murder.Race, in another lengthy and difficult-to-follow speech, made a second attempt to fire McCormick. The judge denied his request.

McCormick called his only witness to the stand, a local woman named Carol Vennette who claimed she saw a second man with Race in Darcy Manor’s truck the night of the killing. McCormick argued that because the evidence against Race was circumstantial, the presence of this second man — seen by no one but Vennette — created a reasonable doubt. Vennette finished her testimony in under an hour, and the defence rested its case.

The verdict came two days later: Race was guilty of first-degree murder.

At his sentencing hearing, Race declared himself an “international celestial citizen” and proclaimed his innocence, saying he could do no wrong. The judge gave him life with no chance of parole.

Race’s documented history of psychotic episodes, the hospital stays, the years his parents spent trying to get him help, the psychiatric reports that said his actions were motivated by his disease — none of it came to light. No evidence of his mental illness was ever presented in court. Until he returned to Canada.

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In Canada, there was no murder trial.

Race admitted to killing Knott and Brewster and pleaded guilty in their deaths. At issue in court was whether he should be held criminally responsible for what he did.

Two Halifax Crown attorneys spent six months combing through the details of the case full time. They examined all evidence, visited the New York crime scene and traced Race’s movements from Nova Scotia to Texas. In the end, they decided not to contest defence lawyer Joel Pink’s request for a verdict of not criminally responsible, or NCR.

The prosecutors, veteran Paul Carver and his co-counsel Mark Heerema, didn’t have much choice. Four psychiatrists — one appointed by the court, one hired by the Crown and two hired by the defence — had all reached the same conclusion after assessing Race. They believed he was psychotic when he killed Knott and Brewster, and that his mental illness prevented him from understanding the moral wrongness of his actions.

In Canada, when experts unanimously agree that an accused did not have the mental capacity to form criminal intent, the Crown typically does not contest the defence team’s request for an NCR verdict. Instead, both sides present psychiatric evidence in a short trial, after which the judge makes a finding on criminal responsibility.

NCR is the expected verdict in such cases. The trial is largely a formality, though an important one. It is seen as an opportunity to put the facts of the case on the record for the judge to consider, and to make sure the public is informed about what happened and why.

In November 2013, Race, who had been transported to Halifax to face the charges in Canada with permission from U.S. authorities three years earlier, appeared before Justice Kevin Coady in Nova Scotia Supreme Court. Three psychiatrists testified in his five-day NCR trial.

“If the NCR defence doesn’t apply to Mr. Race, it shouldn’t apply to anybody,” Dr. Stephen Hucker, a forensic psychiatrist and professor at the University of Toronto, said at the hearing.

Hucker was one of the two experts slated to testify for the defence in New York before McCormick’s last-minute change in plans. He had first met Race at the Clinton County jail in the months following the killings. After the New York verdict, Hucker had reviewed the late-breaking report by state expert Dr. Angela Hegarty that had derailed the American trial, and dismissed her conclusions.

In fact, Hegarty’s report and methods had been roundly criticized by the Canadian experts, and her opinions on Race’s illness — for example, that his symptoms were more consistent with a personality disorder than psychosis — had been contradicted by American doctors who assessed Race after his conviction and unequivocally concluded that he had schizophrenia.

Hegarty had argued in her report that Race exaggerated his illness and was coached in phone calls with his parents and brother about what symptoms to emphasize. Hucker and others had a different view: they believed Glen’s family was simply encouraging him to be open about his delusions and hallucinations, and not mask them as he had been known to do.

The Halifax prosecutors did not call Hegarty to testify.

In closing arguments at the end of the weeklong hearing, Heerema set out to answer the question often on the public’s mind in NCR cases. In his words: “How could a justice system allow someone who savagely killed two people to not go to jail?”

What is not in dispute, Heerema said, is that Race suffers from schizophrenia, “an illness that indiscriminately picks its victims.” But in order to be found not criminally responsible, the prosecutor explained, an accused must meet a strict legal definition enshrined in Section 16 of the Criminal Code. It is not enough simply to have a mental illness. The law says the disorder must have been present at the time the offence was committed, not before or after.

On that requirement, all forensic assessors agreed that Race was mentally ill when he killed Paul Knott and Trevor Brewster.

The second part of the law has two branches, and the defence must prove one of them: that the illness rendered the person incapable of appreciating the nature and quality of the act, or incapable of knowing it was legally or morally wrong.

All assessors agreed Glen Race failed the first branch. He understood that by attacking Brewster and Knott, he was causing their deaths. They also agreed that Race knew he was acting against the laws of Canada. However, all concluded he did not know that what he was doing was morally wrong. They believed Race was, in Heerema’s words, “not able to rationally engage in the decision of whether to choose his morality or the morality of society.”

The law does not require absolute certainty. The threshold for proving criminal responsibility is on the “balance of probabilities” — in other words, more likely than not, or more than 50 per cent. The burden of proof is on the defence.

The law says the courts should not disregard unanimous expert opinion unless it is seriously challenged by the evidence. Heerema, recognizing this decision would rest with the judge, laid out all the inconsistencies for consideration. He argued that what Race was able to accomplish in May 2007 was “remarkable” — travelling across the U.S. without a passport, killing covertly, covering up his crimes without being detected.

Race was “highly effective and highly capable,” Heerema said. His behaviour showed evidence of planning and goal-oriented thinking. He had taken out library books on Mexico in the days before his killing spree. He had made unsuccessful attempts to travel south in the past. Heerema also argued the psychiatrists didn’t have a good answer to the question of why, if Race believed the world was inhabited by vampires and demons, he didn’t kill everyone he saw.

And even though the Hegarty report had been discredited, Heerema said he found the contents of the recorded telephone conversations she relied upon troubling — in particular, calls in which Race sounded more lucid when discussing trial strategy with his family than he did during psychiatric assessments.

“I would agree that Mr. Race sometimes shows a good ability to focus on specific issues without any apparently psychotic symptoms intruding,” Hucker wrote in his report. “It is, however, not inconsistent with a psychotic diagnosis that the person may for brief periods be able to focus on some issue of importance to them.”

The experts acknowledged some inconsistencies, but ultimately concluded that delusions drove Race to do what he did. They all agreed that while he did not show overt signs of mental illness during the killing spree, his behaviour wasn’t incompatible with his history, given his intelligence and his guarded and secretive nature.

In January 2014, Coady delivered the expected verdict: not criminally responsible.

Under normal circumstances, Race would have been detained indefinitely in a psychiatric hospital for treatment, with the possibility of one day being released if he became well and was no longer deemed a significant threat to society. But the arrangement with U.S. authorities that allowed him to go to court in Nova Scotia required that he be returned to the U.S. to serve his sentence, no matter how the Canadian proceedings ended. Within hours of the verdict, he was on an RCMP plane back to New York.

The Nova Scotia verdict made the outcome of the New York trial all the more enraging to Glen Race’s defenders.

“In my opinion, everybody screwed up — the prosecution, the defence and the judge,” said Joel Pink, Race’s Halifax lawyer.

Pink blames the district attorney for presenting new evidence on the first day of trial. He blames the judge for refusing to grant a reasonable request for a delay in the trial. And he blames lawyer Mark McCormick for dropping the insanity defence despite Race’s well-documented history of mental illness.

“The guy is sick, OK?” Pink said. “I’ve seen many, many individuals over the years. There’s no one like Glen Race.”

Pink believes that what happened in New York never would have taken place in a Canadian court. Legal experts at home and in the U.S. who were familiar with the facts of the case but not directly involved shared his concerns.

“If Race doesn’t get a new trial, there is something terribly wrong with their justice system,” said Bob Richardson, a Toronto criminal defence lawyer who has taken on complex mental health cases over his 30-year career.

“It does indeed look like Mr. Race got the bum’s rush out of court,” said Justice Richard Schneider, chair of the Ontario Review Board, a provincial body that oversees individuals found not criminally responsible or unfit to stand trial. “The prosecution should have been criticized for dropping such a bomb with no disclosure to the defence.”

Charles P. Ewing, a forensic psychologist, lawyer and professor at the University at Buffalo Law School, said he couldn’t understand why the judge would have denied the continuance request, particularly in a trial without a jury. He also said the last-minute change in defence would have prejudiced the case.

“I would want to know why the defence attorney changed his mind ... and went from a defence of ‘I did it, but I was insane’ to a defence of ‘I didn’t do it’ when the trier of fact had already been made aware of the insanity plea,” Ewing said.

Race’s first attempt at seeking a new trial, a standard “direct appeal” filed in the immediate aftermath of the verdict, failed. But his brother has been working with a New York lawyer and expects to file an appeal claiming ineffective assistance of counsel before the end of the year.

“We just want a fair trial,” Doug said recently. “We want the truth of the matter to come out.”

Mark McCormick no longer practises law. Two years after the Race verdict, his licence was suspended after he failed to appear in court to produce files for an unrelated criminal appeal. He decided then to leave the profession.

“I guess you could just call it a degree of burnout,” McCormick said, speaking on the phone from his home in Franklin County, N.Y., where he manages a small golf course and referees high school and college sports. “I was ready to do something different.”

McCormick was not surprised to hear criticism or learn that the Race family plans to mount an appeal. It is “incredibly common,” he said, for defendants to argue ineffective assistance of counsel after a guilty verdict. Given the late disclosure of evidence, McCormick said there is no way he could have gone through all the new material in the middle of an intense trial, when he was already run ragged and barely getting three hours of sleep each night.

“I’m not sure how I could have possibly done more in the time that I had,” he said. The decision to drop the mental disorder defence may not have worked, McCormick said, but he believed at the time that it was his client’s best shot.

Pink doesn’t buy it. “You could be a first-year law student and know that circumstantial evidence was not a defence in this case,” he said, pounding his fist on a boardroom table in his Halifax office. The argument only works if the facts are consistent with some other rational conclusion, Pink said, and in this case, “there was no other rational conclusion.”

Stephen Preziosi, a New York appellate attorney who has been working with the Race family, believes they have a strong case for an appeal based on ineffective assistance of counsel.

Two laws would apply to the appeal process — state and federal. The state standard relies upon the following test: given all the evidence, facts and circumstances, was the defendant provided with meaningful representation?

The federal standard, a two-part test that falls under the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, asks: did the attorney’s performance fall below an objective reasonable standard? And if it did, was the defendant prejudiced by it, and would the trial outcome have been different without the substandard performance?

Appeal judges are not meant to second-guess a trial attorney’s strategic decisions, Preziosi said. A failed strategy is not enough to prove ineffective counsel.

Preziosi believes one of the strongest arguments for appeal is that McCormick abandoned the insanity defence. “Everybody had anticipated that this would be the defence right up until the middle of trial. This was a midstream decision. Whether or not one is going to present a defence needs to be decided before opening statements. How can you make that kind of a decision midtrial? To me it demonstrates that he was not prepared from the beginning.

“Is it reasonable not to present a psychiatric defence when your client has a long history of this kind of behaviour?” he said. “I don’t believe it is.”

As for the state’s late disclosure of the jailhouse recordings, Preziosi was baffled. “It just absolutely amazes me that these kinds of things are allowed in a court in the United States of America.”

District attorney Andrew Wylie, still lead prosecutor for Clinton County and fresh from a recent moment in the international spotlight handling the infamous 2015 New York prison escape case, said his office believes the trial was fair and impartial. Despite the outcome in Canada, Wylie continues to insist Race invented his mental illness.

“It was a trial strategy that was used by the defendant. Point blank. That’s not my opinion, that’s what occurred,” Wylie said in a phone call.

“I mean, you kill two people in Canada, you then are followed by the police, you drive through Nova Scotia, you drive down to the Quebec border, you then make efforts to cover up the vehicle in Quebec, you cross over into the border into New York, you take solace in a hunting camp in upstate New York, you wait until a person arrives, you shoot, kill that person, you then drive south continuing to take plates off vehicles, then get to an area of Texas where you’re going to cross the border. Sounds like the person had a pretty good understanding and idea of what they were doing, when they were doing it and how they did it.”

Wylie dismissed the substantial amount of psychiatric evidence that concluded Race’s actions were motivated by delusions. “Whatever,” he said. “That’s basically my response to that, ma’am.” He refused to respond to a detailed follow-up email.

Wylie’s perspectiveunderscores the challenge in presenting a mental disorder defence in the state of New York, where only seven people charged with murder have been found not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect after trial over the past decade. “It’s a very, very tough case to make,” said Ewing. “And it’s especially tough in the rural upstate counties. People just don’t buy it. They don’t believe it. They don’t believe in it.”

Juries are tough. But U.S. lawyers consulted for this story said they would avoid choosing a judge-alone trial in an insanity case, primarily because judges in New York, unlike in Canada, are elected, and there is a sense that political considerations may make them hesitant to rule against popular opinion.

Ultimately, Ewing said, the argument in the Race case — not guilty vs. not responsible — may not have changed the outcome. But he agreed with what Race’s supporters have been arguing for years: a fair trial would have allowed him to make his case.

With its nine-metre concrete walls and red-capped turrets, the Attica Correctional Facility, one of America’s most notorious prisons, has the aura of a medieval castle. The maximum-security institution sits on a country road in upstate New York. It houses roughly 2,000 inmates and was the site of a 1971 uprising that left 43 people dead.

Beyond the walls, past half a dozen security checks and into a brick building in the inner compound, inmates sit unshackled in a large cafeteria-style visitation room at small tables arranged in rows, sharing a rare moment with their parents, wives, girlfriends and children.

On March 3, 2015, two days before his 34th birthday, Race lumbers down an aisle and takes a seat at one of the tables, facing a wall of uniformed prison guards and vending machines. He is a large man, swollen with weight gain from the antipsychotic medication he has been forced by court order to take for the past several months. He is wearing green prison sweats. His hair is slicked back with gel. His brown eyes are half-closed, narrowed suspiciously. His left wrist bears a twisted, quarter-sized scar from a pretrial suicide attempt at the Clinton County jail in which he bit through his own skin, trusting that death would allow him to walk through the jailhouse walls and “reanimate” on the other side.

“I never really believed in schizophrenia from the get-go,” Race says. “I don’t believe it’s a real thing.”

He speaks haltingly, tapping his tobacco-stained fingers on his chin. Race can carry on a conversation, but his deeper thoughts tend to devolve into rambling pontifications on spirituality. Small talk is fine. He says he spends much of his time meditating in his cell. He says his father is coming to visit this week. He says he regrets dropping out of university. He mentions that he lived with his parents in Windsor, N.S., for a few years. “Before I went and killed three people,” he adds.

Even though Race does not believe in psychiatry or mental illness, his goal for the past decade has been to “get the NGRI” — to be found not guilty by reason of insanity. “I’m left with no option but to go with society’s way of looking at it,” he says. “That’s my only real chance at freedom.”

He hopes to be released so he can work on his would-be inventions, which include a kind of quick-dry underwear, a robotic arm and other creations he believes could make him a “handsome buck.”

Race believes that what doctors call insanity is actually a “spiritual psychic experience.” Hallucinations, to him, are visions. The voices in his head are real conversations with various Buddhas and deities. “It’s almost like you’re speaking to one of their astro-manifestations,” he explains.

A few months ago, Race had what he describes as a spiritual awakening. It occurred when he was being held in an observation cell, before he was forced to receive injections of the antipsychotic drug risperidone, which calms some but not all of his symptoms. “Beings,” he says, were all around him — on the walls, on the ceiling, within his reach. “It had extraordinary meaning,” he says solemnly. He hasn’t felt anything like it since, which he blames on the drugs.

Race acknowledges his crimes, but in his current state of unwellness seems to have mixed feelings about what he did. “I don’t believe in wrong choices,” he says, when those choices were guided by a “higher being.” He says regret and remorse are negative emotions. “It could all be very detrimental to a person’s state of being, to say you did something wrong.”

“The difference is now I see a reason — a very strong reason — of why I should never cause harm again.”

The reason is largely that he doesn’t want to be in jail. Race has never expressed true remorse for his crimes, which his brother, Doug, attributes to the fact that he has not been effectively treated since he became ill.

“He regrets doing what he did because it has landed him in this situation,” Doug says. “But to him the people that he killed were, sadly, they were a manifestation of his mind that was something demonic. He still believes that stuff.”

Glen may not feel regret, but his family does. Doug, 32, a salesman who lives in Calgary with his wife, often wonders how things would have played out if he hadn’t moved to Alberta the month before the killings.

“I think about those other families — the Manor, Knott and Brewster families — who actually lost loved ones and it hurts,” he says. “It hurts bad. I don’t want people to think that we don’t think about that stuff.” Still, he says, his brother is a victim, too. “He’s a victim of his illness.”

At home in Nova Scotia, Donna spends much of her time smoking cigarettes and watching television in her basement den. Sometimes she flips through a box of old letters she wrote to her son in the early days of his illness and contemplates throwing them into the wood stove, which she believes might help ease her pain. The letters remind her of how hard she tried, and how nothing worked.

“If anybody was gonna reach him it was gonna be me but I didn’t succeed in that,” she says.

Donna, 67, has spent years dwelling on a long list of could-have-beens. If only she could have understood Glen better. If only she could have convinced him to trust her. If only they could have stopped him from reading the antipsychiatry blogs that made him suspicious of hospitals and doctors. Show her a picture of the boys as kids and she’ll break down. She’s happiest in her garden, but even there she sometimes loses herself in thought and doubles over in a panic attack.

Mark, 65, busies himself with cooking, errands and household projects. He goes to church on Sundays. He plays pool on Thursdays. He golfs. He does the grocery shopping, makes soups and stews, bakes cookies. He fixes things around the house as soon as they need fixing. He builds birdfeeders and gives them away to friends. Keeping busy helps him cope, but Glen is always on his mind.

“I think about it all the time,” he says. “Not once a day. It’s always on my mind.”

A couple of times each year he and Donna drive to New York to see their son. When they meet in the Attica visitation room, Mark buys a stack of microwaveable burgers from the vending machine. They play cards and chat about Glen’s inventions and life back home. Mark steers away from heavy subjects, but every once in a while Glen will allude to a future that his father knows doesn’t exist.

“He says, when I get out I think I’d wanna build a house on the top of that hill over there behind your house and have a family and everything,” Mark says. “What are you supposed to say to him? You know? You gotta downplay it because you can’t say, oh, I don’t think that’s gonna happen, Glen.”

The Race family knows the odds are against them, but in their ideal world, Glen would get a new trial. He would be found not responsible in New York, and he would be sent to a psychiatric facility for treatment. If they made it that far, Doug would fight to have his brother transferred to a Canadian institution.

The family acknowledges that Glen may never be well enough to be released from medical care, given his lack of insight, his continued suspicion of doctors and the length of time his illness has gone untreated. His father says that’s not their call.

“We still have hope that we’ll be able to get him at least the trial that he deserves,” Mark says. “What the outcome will be, we don’t know.”

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