Serial killer Dellen Millard has received a one-year sentence for his role in a prison stabbing.
The 12 months will be served concurrently with the three first-degree murder convictions he’s already serving for killing his father Wayne Millard, Tim Bosma from Hamilton, and Laura Babcock from Toronto.
Millard was involved in a fight in July 2021 inside the prison and was charged, along with a man named Clayton Sumner, with assault causing bodily harm.
Court heard the stabbing left fellow inmate Sean Trites with his shirt torn and blood-soaked, cuts to his neck and left shoulder and a puncture wound to his abdomen.
A doctor who saw Trites the next day, reopening his chest to treat fresh bleeding around his heart, testified the injury was potentially life-threatening, Justice Geoffrey Griffin told the court.
Crown attorney Tim Kavanagh called for a four-year sentence, pointing to Millard’s first-degree murder charges and describing him as the “worst offender that can come before a court.”
Millard represented himself in the matter. He appeared by video, his arms covered in tattoos and his brown hair short, except for a long, thin braid that hung over his shoulder.
Griffin summarized Millard’s submissions, where the accused said the Crown was basing its four-year estimate on his “notoriety,” and that it was difficult to suggest a sentence for a crime he wasn’t guilty of.
During the trial Millard called several witnesses, including Trites, who the judge said testified Millard had saved his life that day.
However, in his decision shared in early March, Griffin noted Trites was very reluctant to testify, at first refusing to leave his cell, and would not submit to cross-examination by the Crown.
Surveillance video showed attack
The judge also referenced a surveillance video from the prison, which captured much of the violent portion of the fight, saying it was clear Millard was more than an observer even though Sumner was the person holding the shank.
The video shows Millard putting his arm on Trites’s back and pushing him toward Sumner, before using both arms and standing behind him so he couldn’t get away, according to Griffin.
“When someone is being stabbed, the idea that you would pull that person in a fashion to allow more access for the attacker to be able to get it that person, even for a brief period of time, is a serious issue that must be denounced,” the judge said in his decision Thursday.
Sumner, who pleaded guilty, also received a sentence of 12 months, a factor Griffin said he considered when determining a fair sentence for Millard.
Millard has also been handed a lifetime weapons prohibition and will have to supply a sample of DNA.
Millard compared stabbing to a dog fight
The judge previously dismissed motions Millard filed in early June that called for a mistrial and to set aside the verdict and reopen the case for the defence.
Among the materials he submitted was a letter from Trites signed “your boy, Slick,” and saying the court was “biased” against him, according to the judge.
Griffin also referenced what he described as an “imaginative” document written by Millard providing a blow-by-blow account of the stabbing, comparing it to a dog fight with the other two men “dancing like tortured dogs in the pit,” while he tried to break it up.
Griffin equated the materials from Millard to a “do-over.”
“Mr. Millard must, in my view, live with the consequences of his decision not to testify,” he said.
Millard said Thursday he’s had “limited experience” in the justice system and, if his attempt to reopen the trial wasn’t successful, he intends to appeal its outcome.
