The Crown is seeking a psychiatric assessment of a Surrey man who was found guilty of aggravated assault for cutting another man’s finger, prior to his sentencing, to be used as evidence in an application to have him designated a dangerous offender or long-term offender.
Justice David Layton noted in his reasons for judgment, delivered in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster, that the Crown hasn’t yet decided if it will seek the designation at sentencing though it anticipates an assessment report will help it make that decision.
“The record put before me by the Crown on this application establishes that there are reasonable grounds to believe that at his sentencing for this offence Mr. Kueth might be found to be a dangerous offender,” Layton noted. He remanded him for 60 days for an assessment.
“My understanding is that pursuant to this order Mr. Kueth will be referred to the Forensic Psychiatric Services Commission, where an expert will be randomly selected to perform the assessment and produce a report for the parties and the court,” Layton said.
Layton found Jaal Routh Kueth, 33, guilty as charged on March 12, 2025 for cutting Mark Datinguinoo, 38, on Feb. 26, 2023 at the victim’s Surrey apartment. Aggravated assault is an indictable offence carrying a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison.
Layton noted that legislation requires that an offender subject to a dangerous offender or long-term offender be found to constitute “a threat to the life, safety or physical or mental well-being of other persons on the basis of evidence establishing the following three things: a pattern of persistent aggressive behaviour; the index offence forms part of that pattern; and the pattern shows a substantial degree of indifference by the offender regarding the reasonably foreseeable consequences to other persons of his behaviour.”
Turning to Kueth’s criminal record, the judge noted, on Nov. 28, 2018 he was sentenced to 30 months for “numerous offences” including three robberies where he used a replica gun. In the 14 days after his release in August 2020 Kueth, committed two aggravated assaults with a knife, was arrested and convicted of these and three other crimes committed over those two weeks, was released on Feb. 2, 2023, and four days later committed the aggravated assault against Datinguinoo.
Layton noted Kueth appears to have been addicted to crystal meth since early adulthood and has some 60 convictions dating back to 2011, with 19 of those for breaching court orders.
”In particular, the three robberies and three aggravated assaults were all committed while Mr. Kueth was on probation or bail. This suggests an inability to control his conduct,” the judge observed.
During the Surrey apartment aggravated assault trial last year Datinguinoo was the Crown’s key witness but Kueth did not call any evidence in his defence.
During the trial Datinguinoo didn’t have a job and was living in a shelter but at the time of the offence was living with four other people in a one-bedroom apartment on the seventh floor of a tower roughly a 10-minute walk from the Surrey Central SkyTrain Station.
He testified that on Feb. 6, 2023, he woke up at about 5:30 a.m. asked walked to the SkyTrain station to bum a cigarette. He ran into Kueth in the building’s lobby, whom he recognized from the North Surrey Pretrial Centre, and asked him if he had a smoke.
Datinguinoo testified Kueth approached him from a couple of steps away and had numerous “scratch and win” lottery tickets. At the apartment they scratched the tickets and won $40.
Datinguinoo testified that after smoking some meth they didn’t speak for about half an hour. During this time, he said, he was intoxicated and sat on his bed looking at his cell phone while Kueth also seemed high and was going back-and-forth around the kitchen. “Mr. Datinguinoo testified that he then felt a knife ‘going through my neck,’ but ‘softly.’ It was not a strong strike but rather ‘touched’ his neck, and he was lucky,” Layton recalled. “He leaned back on his bed through ‘basic instinct,’ and kicked Mr. Kueth while lying down, as his instinct was to get out of ‘that violence.’”
A police photograph of Datinguinoo’s neck showed what appeared to be “two or three reddish, linear scrapes, as opposed to cuts, each about a centimetre in length. He testified that these marks were the result of the knife touching his neck during the incident.”
Datinguinoo testified the knife came from the kitchen. He kicked Kueth out of the apartment and called 911. One police photograph shows two injuries on his index finger, with the first being “a fairly deep cut, perhaps a couple of centimetres long, running almost horizontally just below the knuckle, and spread open several millimetres in the middle. “The second injury is more of a curved cut, of approximately the same length if not slightly longer, but likely shallower, on the side of the same finger but facing the thumb and closer to the webbing,” Layton noted in his March 12, 2025 reasons for judgment.
He found Datinguinoo’s testimony to be “credible and reliable” that Kueth attacked him with a knife on Feb. 6, 2023 and concluded that the Crown proved beyond a reasonable doubt Kueth “intentionally stabbed Mr. Datinguinoo without the latter’s consent.”
The judge found the deeper of the two cuts to Datinguinoo’s index finger is a “wound” within the meaning of the Criminal Code, because it is a break in the continuity of the whole skin that interfered in a substantial way with his integrity, health or well-being, and thus constitutes serious bodily harm.
“In addition, I find on the criminal standard that a reasonable person in Mr. Kueth’s place would have realized that lunging at another person with a knife in the manner described by Mr. Datinguinoo would put that other person at risk of suffering some kind of bodily harm. Accordingly, I conclude that the Crown has met its onus of proving that Mr. Kueth committed aggravated assault on Mr. Datinguinoo.”