Daily BrewGore website owner gets bail on charges of posting Luka Magnotta video
An Edmonton man charged in connection to a graphic video at the centre of the Luka Magnotta murder investigation has been granted bail and is vowing to fight the charges.
The Edmonton Journal reports that Mark Marek, 38, was granted $7,500 bail on Thursday, one day after police announced he would be charged after a video depicting the death of Jun Lin, a Montreal student whose body parts were mailed across the country, was allegedly posted to his website.
Police allege Marek knowingly received the video from Luka Magnotta, who has been charged in the murder of Lin, and posted in to his website, bestgore.com.
Bestgore.com is a graphic "shock" site where disturbing pictures and videos are posted.
The website posted the video tiled "1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick" on May 26, days before publicly identified Magnotta as a murder suspect.
The video reportedly depicts a man said to be Lin bound to a bed and slowly being dismembered and killed by another person. Magnotta was arrested while visiting a German internet café in June 2012 and charged in Lin’s death.
[ Related: Gore website owner charged for hosting Magnotta video ]
The Journal reports that Marek's lawyer argued the video had been posted in the public's interest. The lawyer added that the video was taken down when someone suggested it was an actual murder.
The Crown, meantime, claims Marek only removed the video because his site could not handle the heavy traffic and had promised to repost it later. Marek's passport was seized and as a condition of his bail, he cannot access the internet.
Marek's defence doesn't seem to be a surprise. He had been in contact with police and previously claimed he wasn't afraid of being charged.
A note posted on bestgore.com reads:
It may be morally questionable, socially inappropriate and a thousand of other things, but it is NOT illegal. Best Gore is operated out of Canada and hosted in the United States of America. It was carefully reviewed by US and Canadian attorneys and both confirmed that BestGore.com is 100% legal in both jurisdictions. It is afterall naught more than a news website. Reporting on actual events and providing news on them without censorship is not outlawed by neither country.
Edmonton police believe otherwise. On Wednesday, they charged Marek with corrupting morals, a little-used section of the Criminal Code.
Section 163.1 (a) states anyone is guilty of corrupting morals who:
makes, prints, publishes, distributes, circulates, or has in his possession for the purpose of publication, distribution or circulation any obscene written matter, picture, model, phonograph record or other thing whatever.
The corrupting morals law goes on to call it an offence to expose to public view any obscene writing, pictures or "phonograph record" - which, aside from sounding somewhat outdated, seems to cover every pornographic website and magazine.
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Section 163 also states that offering to sell, or advertising, abortion methods and drugs, or sexual virility methods or drugs, is against the law (unless they serve the good of the public).
Another odd mention is that it is illegal to print or publish "crime comics," which are exactly what they sound like.
CBC News details this point in a recent article, stating that much of this section was inspired by a dark comic obsession in 1949.
The network writes: “E. Davie Fulton, who would go on to be a federal Progressive Conservative cabinet minister and twice a contender for the party leadership, introduced a private member's bill following a senseless killing by two boys in northern B.C. in 1948. The crime shocked people and the investigation discovered that the boys were avid readers of crime comics.”
Marek is scheduled to return to court on Aug. 1.
