Dorval cop killer Real Poirier: did he get off too easy?

   Did our justice system let off a Montreal cop killer Real Poirier too easily?
   Five-year Montreal police veteran Jacinthe Fyfe, 25, was shot dead near 285 Malcolm Crescent in Dorval on Oct. 26, 1985.
   The killer, Real Poirier, was a 21-year-old unemployed labourer whose wife had given birth just days earlier.
  Poirier was from a caring family in St. Zotique, Quebec but he suffered from schizophrenia.
   He took his sister's car and a .308 calibre rifle and drove from his home west of Montreal to Dorval where he ran out of gas.
   He had the rifle because he wanted to shoot boxer Alex Hilton, who had beaten him three days earlier in a booze up.
   Hilton admits that he hit Poirier but he says that Poirier had approached him with a broken bottle.
   Poirier told his legal team that Hilton, a ferocious boxing champion around that time, taunted him with racist insults (presumably about being French), then pulled his beard and punched him in the temple, knocking him out.
  Poirier was also reportedly hit over the head with a wine bottle in the late night drinking session but it's unclear whether Hilton had any connection to that blow.
   This trauma apparently drove Poirier over the brink and led to his paranoid gun-toting outing three days later.
   Police responded to a report concerning Poirier who was wandering around with a shotgun. When they arrived Poirier was hiding under a tree, '
   Poirier shot Fyfe dead through the back window of her police cruiser.
   Fyfe became the first female police officer to be killed on duty in Canada.
   Killing a police officer usually gets punished with life imprisonment without chance at parole for 25 years. Others mused that maybe capital punishment should be brought back for such cases.
  Poirier was found fit to stand trial but later acquitted on the basis of temporary insanity.
  A psychiatrist convinced the court that Poirier had become unsettled after being beaten by Hilton.
  A critic might argue that all almost all perpetrators of violence became violent after suffering at the hands of other violent people.
   So whether such victimization should result in exoneration remains an interesting subject for debate.
  Poirier was placed in the Pinel Institute for the Criminally Insane.
  It it unknown how long Poirier stayed at the facility but one unconfirmed source said that he stayed inside only for about one year.