The Crown is seeking a psychiatric assessment of a Surrey man who was found guilty of aggravated assault for cutting another man\u2019s finger, prior to his sentencing, to be used as evidence in an application to have him designated a dangerous offender or long-term offender.<\/p>\n
Justice David Layton noted in his reasons for judgment<\/a>, delivered in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster, that the Crown hasn\u2019t yet decided if it will seek the designation at sentencing though it anticipates an assessment report will help it make that decision.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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,\u201d Layton noted. He remanded him for 60 days for an assessment.<\/p>\n \u201cMy 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,\u201d Layton said.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Surrey apartment. Aggravated assault is an indictable offence carrying a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison.<\/p>\n Layton noted that legislation requires that an offender subject to a dangerous offender or long-term offender be found to constitute \u201ca 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Turning to Kueth\u2019s criminal record, the judge noted, on Nov. 28, 2018 he was sentenced to 30 months for \u201cnumerous offences\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201dIn 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,\u201d the judge observed.<\/p>\n During the Surrey apartment aggravated assault trial last year Datinguinoo was the Crown\u2019s key witness<\/a> but Kueth did not call any evidence in his defence.<\/p>\n During the trial Datinguinoo didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s lobby, whom he recognized from the North Surrey Pretrial Centre, and asked him if he had a smoke.<\/p>\n Datinguinoo testified Kueth approached him from a couple of steps away and had numerous \u201cscratch and win\u201d lottery tickets. At the apartment they scratched the tickets and won $40.<\/p>\n Datinguinoo testified that after smoking some meth they didn\u2019t 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. \u201cMr. Datinguinoo testified that he then felt a knife \u2018going through my neck,\u2019 but \u2018softly.\u2019 It was not a strong strike but rather \u2018touched\u2019 his neck, and he was lucky,\u201d Layton recalled. \u201cHe leaned back on his bed through \u2018basic instinct,\u2019 and kicked Mr. Kueth while lying down, as his instinct was to get out of \u2018that violence.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n A police photograph of Datinguinoo\u2019s neck showed what appeared to be \u201ctwo 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201ca fairly deep cut, perhaps a couple of centimetres long, running almost horizontally just below the knuckle, and spread open several millimetres in the middle. \u201cThe 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,\u201d Layton noted in his March 12, 2025 reasons for judgment.<\/a><\/p>\n He found Datinguinoo\u2019s testimony to be \u201ccredible and reliable\u201d that Kueth attacked him with a knife on Feb. 6, 2023 and concluded that the Crown proved beyond a reasonable doubt Kueth \u201cintentionally stabbed Mr. Datinguinoo without the latter\u2019s consent.\u201d<\/p>\n The judge found the deeper of the two cuts to Datinguinoo\u2019s index finger is a \u201cwound\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIn addition, I find on the criminal standard that a reasonable person in Mr. Kueth\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Crown is seeking a psychiatric assessment of a Surrey man who was found guilty of aggravated assault…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544481,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194299],"tags":[49,48,87674],"class_list":{"0":"post-544480","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-surrey","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-surrey"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544480\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}