Parents would die for their kids. Guy Turcotte killed his.

Stabbed the two youngsters 46 times after they’d all spent the evening watching a video, after he’d tucked them into bed, after 5-year-old Olivier had put his arms around his weeping father and said he loved him.

After Olivier, coughing up blood from the first blows, had screamed: “Nooo!”

“I have a knife in my hands, I stabbed him,” Turcotte told court at his 2011 murder trial. “I panicked and stabbed him some more.”

Then he did the same to 3-year-old Anne-Sophie.

Turcotte remembered that much, if not able to explain the why of it, how he could have done such a thing, even amidst the despondency he’d been experiencing over the breakup of his marriage and distraught when, earlier that night, reading passionate emails between his estranged wife and her lover.

“Isabelle and myself, we’d never loved each other like that,” Turcotte testified.

“I live with these images that keep coming back to me and I’m terrorized.”

Yet his own life — as a doctor, a cardiologist — Turcotte wants that back, medical licence reinstated, eventually, he hopes, to love again, have more children.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have objectives,” he told a review board in early 2012.

Barely a year had passed but, oh, he was fine now, no longer depressed or suicidal and professing he no longer required medication.

After listening to professionals who’d been treating Turcotte at a psychiatric institution, the board agreed and allowed him to start escorted trips outside. Forty-six months in Montreal’s Pinel Institute — a year less than young Olivier’s lifetime — Turcotte was released with conditions in December 2012.

There was public outrage, as there had been following the original verdict of not criminally responsible to ghastly murders that Turcotte had never denied committing, only that there had been no intent, that he remembered only flashes of the bloody events, and that he’d intended to kill himself as well by drinking windshield washer fluid.

That much — the part that helped his not criminally responsible (NCR) defence — Turcotte could recall.

The case was rife with such troubling aspects. Yet the trial judge was selective — and remiss — in his instructions to the jury. He did not fully recap all the psychiatric evidence when he explained criteria for a verdict of NCR. He did not properly outline how much weight Turcotte’s intoxication, from the windshield washer fluid, should have played in determining the mental capacity of the accused. He did not instruct the jury on the key question of whether “this mental problem,” as the judge described Turcotte’s state of mind, or the intoxication had rendered him incapable of rational judgment.

These were all elements that the Quebec Court of Appeal cited in overturning the NCR verdict this past November and ordering a new trial on two counts of first-degree murder. Turcotte was rearrested the same day. A date for the new trial was to have been set last week.

Instead, Turcotte’s lawyer announced he would be going to the Supreme Court of Canada to seek leave to appeal the order for a new trial. Quebec Superior Court will wait for the outcome of that gambit. The Supreme Court could also reinstate the jury’s nonconviction verdict.

A new trial, Justice Marc David said, won’t take place before March 2015 — more than six years after Turcotte killed his children in Saint-Jerome, north of Montreal, on Feb. 21, 2009.

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Because he had no more to live for, then the children had to die, too. At trial, Turcotte told the jury there had been no plan to murder the children, not at first, as he began downing glasses of windshield washer fluid. Then he visualized the kids — they were staying with him while his wife was on a skiing trip — waking up and finding their father dead. “And I don’t want my children to find me dead. I say to myself, ‘I’m going to take them with me.’ ”

This is the part I cannot understand about parents who kill their kids and then say they cannot remember the crime or were too mentally deranged at the time to form intent or, as in the case of Robert Latimer, justify murder as compassionate euthanasia for a suffering disabled child. (Latimer, whose 10-year sentence for second-degree murder was upheld by the Supreme Court, was paroled in 2010. He has never admitted wrongdoing.)

When Turcotte regained consciousness on the morning after, saw what he’d done, he wasn’t so overwhelmed by horror that he made a second attempt on his own life. Police found him cowering under the bed.

Not criminally responsible is a grossly subjective finding. It means that an individual has already been found sufficiently sane to stand trial, understands the proceeding and can communicate with defence counsel. But even when the facts aren’t contested — as Turcotte did not, he stabbed his children to death — a jury or judge can find the defendant not criminally liable for breaking the law because of a mental disorder. There is no conviction and the individual is held in a psychiatric institution until release is ordered by a review board.

In theory, perhaps in the vast majority of cases, that’s the proper legal and societal course, though my three decades of covering courts leaves me skeptical about the value that should be attached to testimony from psychiatric experts. There are professionals who make a sideline career of it, whether appearing for the defence or the prosecution. Frequently, they cancel each other out. But that so profoundly contradictory expert opinions are offered on the witness stand only reinforces my growing view that the experts are expertly clueless.

The public revulsion over Turcotte’s nonconviction and release after so short a period is understandable. This isn’t about seeking vengeance; it’s about demanding justice. Those designated NCR are considered sick, incapacitated by mental illness, not guilty, and must be released when a review board agrees they’ve recovered and aren’t a threat to public safety. But Turcotte’s recovery had been miraculous indeed. Just like Vincent Li, deemed to have been in an undiagnosed schizophrenic state when he decapitated a stranger aboard a Greyhound bus outside Winnipeg in 2008, and ate parts of his body. Li was allowed escorted day trips last May. There was as well the notorious case of Allan Schoenborn, the B.C. father who in ’08 killed his three children — aged 10, 8, 5 — at the home of his estranged wife, after she’d spurned his pleas to renew their relationship. Three years later, a review board decided Schoenborn should be eligible for escorted day passes, a decision that was reversed following public backlash.

Such cases may be rare. But they are so gravely disturbing that the federal government has proposed amendments under the Not Criminally Responsible Reform Act. The amendments explicitly set out that public safety — the physical and psychological risk — should be of “paramount consideration” for courts and review boards. It also would amend the Criminal Code allowing for the designation of high-risk NCR.

Bill C-54 has passed in the House of Commons and is now in the Senate.

Many mental health professionals and defence lawyers are opposed. And one can only speculate whether Guy Turcotte would have been designated high-risk. Unlikely, given the supportive testimony offered at his review hearing.

Sometimes, though, high risk is hardly the issue.

Sometimes it’s just about getting away with murder and condemning an ex-spouse to hell.