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Bisesar had been scheduled to go to trial in January. Instead, she’ll now be forcibly treated with anti-psychotic medication for 60 days. A new jury will then be asked to judge her fitness again early next year. Should she then be declared fit, she’ll go to trial next October.

Robert Karrass, Bisesar’s lawyer, was asked after the hearing why it took so long to get to this point. Bisesar, a deeply ill woman, has spent the last two years in jail. She has visibly deteriorated in that time. In court on Monday, she told the jury she hadn’t washed in weeks. Her hair — black streaked through now with grey — was puffed out in messy tangles.

“The reason I’m such a mess today,” she told the jury, “is because there’s evidence on my face.” She pointed to a mass discolouration on her cheeks and forehead. She said someone had implanted a hard, honeycombed structure beneath her skin. It smelled, she said, of chicken then later fish and finally of “men’s sperm.”

Photo by Toronto Police Service

Karrass only took over Bisesar’s case in June. He said it was obvious to him right away that she could not give him meaningful instructions. He approached Crown attorney Beverley Richards and she agreed to bring forward a motion on fitness. For Karrass, it was a tricky ethical line. He has a duty as an officer of the court, but he also has to serve his client, and his client maintains, to this day, that she is sane.

Should she eventually go to trial, Bisesar’s defence will likely argue that she is not criminally responsible for the killing. To prove that, they would have to convince a jury that Bisesar was deeply mentally ill at the time of the attack. (Fitness, on the other hand, deals with one’s mental state at the time of trial.)

For the moment, Bisesar isn’t even sure there was a crime at all. While she understands that she has been charged with murder, Swayze said, she doesn’t always accept that anyone was actually killed.

After the verdict and the treatment order, Bisesar spoke one more time. She asked the judge to have her physically examined as well. “There’s a criminal component to what’s going on with my face,” she said. She wanted samples taken and tested. There was evidence there, she said, of a grievous crime.

Email: rwarnica@nationalpost.com | Twitter: richardwarnica