Gary Edwin Mattson, who has pleaded guilty to viciously assaulting St. Albert resident and Edmonton Transit driver Tom Bregg, reacts impulsively and aggressively to most situations regardless of their unimportance and poses a danger to the public at large, the Crown argued during Mattson’s dangerous offender hearing Thursday.
Drawing heavily from his criminal record, which shows a sustained pattern of unprovoked assaults, as well as testimony already heard from psychiatrist Dr. Curtis Woods, co-Crown counsel Alana Elliot spent the morning explaining why Mattson should be incarcerated indefinitely.
Elliot’s arguments were a stark counterpoint to a poignant moment between Mattson and his mother during an adjournment. With only a security officer in the courtroom, Mattson’s mother softly told Mattson she loved him, to which he replied that he loved her too.
That moment was quickly overshadowed by the litany of assaults Mattson has committed, which include trying to assault a police officer in a police station when simply asked how Mattson had sustained an injury to his hand, and punching and knocking down a female acquaintance after arguing about which liquor store they should go to.
“This is an aggressive, impulsive reaction to a dispute of a fairly minor matter,” Elliot told Judge Harry Bridges
Citing what Woods had described as a “hair-trigger temper,” Elliot said Mattson was unlikely to change.
“Both common sense and Mr. Woods tell us the best prediction of future violence is past violence,” she said.
While acknowledging that Mattson had never spent more than 90 days in jail for any conviction and that only two cases — including his assault on Bregg — had ever resulted in injury to another person, Elliot said the violence demonstrated in the assault on Bregg is evidence of an offender who is growing increasingly dangerous.
“He has irrefutably demonstrated that he is morally and physically capable of inflicting more serious violence on others,” she said. “It is not self-restraint that holds him back but external restraint.”
Even if the court was to ignore Woods’ diagnosis of Mattson as having paranoid personality disorder, the subsequent inference is frightening, Elliot said.
“That means he is just violent and responds to irritants with violence, which is even more disturbing.”
The Crown is expected to wrap up its closing arguments this afternoon.
