Mike on Crime

By Trevor Pritchard
THE CANADIAN PRESS
TORONTO — It will be at least two months before a Toronto man found not criminally responsible for sexually assaulting a woman because he was asleep at the time learns if he faces any long-term restrictions on his freedom.
Jan Luedecke made a brief appearance Tuesday before the Ontario Review Board at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto.
The board is responsible for determining what conditions, if any, are to be placed upon the landscaper who suffers from sexsomnia, a rare sleep disorder.
Rather than proceed with the hearing, the chair of the five-person panel, Joel Goldenberg, ordered that Luedecke undergo a “full and complete risk assessment” to measure what threat he could pose to the public.
The assessment, to be carried out at CAMH, will be completed by Aug. 28. No assessment had been done on Luedecke in the past 12 months, Goldenberg said.
The bizarre assault took place in the early hours of a July 2003 house party in Toronto.
The victim, who cannot be named, had been asleep on a sofa when she awoke to find a strange man on top of her, engaging in sexual intercourse.
Court later heard that Luedecke had taken magic mushrooms the day before the party and had consumed 12 beer, two rum-and-Cokes, and two vodka drinks in the hours leading up to the assault.
He was also overworked, overstressed, and sleep-deprived, court heard — factors all cited by experts as triggers of sexsomnia.
Luedecke was originally found not guilty in 2005 by a judge who also ruled his condition did not qualify as a “disease of the mind.”
But that decision was quashed by the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2008, which ruled Luedecke instead should have been found not criminally responsible due to having a mental disorder.
Luedecke is currently free on bail and cannot leave Canada. The review board ordered Tuesday that his bail conditions be extended.
The board can order a person to be committed to hospital, release them into the community on certain conditions — such as refraining from drug or alcohol use — or grant an absolute discharge.
It has no power, however, to order an accused to submit to treatment without their consent.
It’s expected the hearing will resume in September.