How Did Killer Morris McConnell Manage to Get Off Without a Hate Crime Charge After Killing A Would-Be Lover?

Morris Richard McConnell, a 59-year-old Canadian Navy veteran, will serve a life sentence (with no eligibility for parole for 10 years) after pleading guilty to second-degree murder after slaying Kelvin John Osborne, 42, in March 2008 by stabbing him in the face, head, and neck, and beating him in the head with a hammer with at least nine bludgeoning blows. McConnell — who told police he had confusion about his sexuality, but was not gay — maintains it was in self-defense, because Osborne, an openly gay man who sometimes went by “Rose,” “danced in front of McConnell and requested oral sex,” and ew, scary fags. The men, who knew each other previously, walked to McConnell’s home hand-in-hand after leaving an inn, according to witnesses. And while McConnell initially told police “He’s dead, I killed him … When he asked me to make love to him I hit him about 100 times with a hammer and slit his throat with a butcher knife,” he later said he had almost no recollection of the attack. Oh, I didn’t yet mention: prosecutors opted not to charge McConnell with a hate crime.

Scott Cooper, representing the Canadian government (or rather, “the Crown”), told the court “this was not a hate crime. … His own [sexual] orientation issues may have put him in a position where this event occurred. … This was an act that was committed as a result of self-loathing.”

You see, because McConnell hated his own sexuality so much, that he attacked a gay man shouldn’t be of consequence. Uh.

Apparently not at issue, then, is that he attacked a gay man because the man was gay, and evidently instigated, or whatever, this self-loathing.

How about we take this to the next level?

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Tip for straight male murderers next time you’re accused of killing a woman: Just say you were so disgusted with your heterosexual feelings that you had no choice but to make her head explode.

That’s not the only tragedy in the Osborne family:

He was the younger brother of Helen Betty Osborne, a 19-year-old woman who was kidnapped off the street in The Pas in 1971. She was then raped and stabbed more than 50 times before her body was dumped in the bush outside the northern Manitoba city. Four white men were finally charged with her killing in 1987, but only one was convicted. Dwayne Archie Johnston was found guilty of second-degree murder and given a life sentence with no chance of parole for 10 years, which he successfully applied for.