Serial killer’s parole eligibility offically shortened

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This article was published 01/09/2022 (748 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba’s highest court has formally struck down a sentence that would prevent convicted serial killer John Ostamas from applying for parole for 75 years.

Ostamas pleaded guilty in 2016 to three counts of first-degree murder in the killings of three homeless men, for which he received three consecutive life sentences, the longest total sentence ever handed down in the province.

The mandatory sentence for a single count of first-degree murder is life in prison with no chance of parole for at least 25 years. A 2011 amendment to the Criminal Code allowed for life sentences to be served consecutive to one another instead of concurrent.

In a decision in May that referenced the Ostamas case, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled the imposition of consecutive life sentences was unconstitutional and violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In the wake of the ruling, Manitoba prosecutors and Ostamas’s lawyers filed a joint sentence appeal seeking an order that his life sentences be served concurrent to each other, “pursuant to the law as it is now clearly understood.”

“We are all of the view that, in order to conform to the law as it is now understood, leave to appeal is granted and the appeal is allowed,” Chief Justice Richard Chartier wrote on behalf of the appeal court in a decision released Thursday.

The Supreme Court ruling was sparked by the case of Alexandre Bissonnette, who was convicted of murdering six people in a Quebec City mosque and sentenced in 2019 to life in prison with no chance of parole for 40 years.

The Supreme Court found the imposition of consecutive life sentences “authorizes a court to order an offender to serve an ineligibility period that exceeds the life expectancy of any human being, a sentence so absurd that it would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.”

The court referenced the Ostamas case as an example of someone being sentenced “to die in prison.”

Ostamas, 45, killed three homeless men in the span of two weeks in April 2015. Miles Monias, 37, was beaten in a Main Street bus shelter on April 10 and later died in hospital. Two weeks later, Ostamas killed 65-year-old Donald Collins in a back lane. Hours later, he killed 48-year-old Stony Bushie in a parkade.

In a 340-page police statement, Ostamas called himself a “killing machine.”

In a letter he wrote to his lawyer in jail and shared with a spiritual counsellor, Ostamas claimed he killed the three men because his pregnant girlfriend had been raped by four men and he planned to track them down and kill them.

“It would have been four, but I only found three,” Ostamas is quoted as saying in court filings.

Police found no evidence the pregnant girlfriend existed.

Under his original sentence, Ostamas would not have been eligible for parole until 2090. He will now be able to apply for release in 2040, when he will be 63 years old.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca