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Maurice Sychuk thinks he deserves a second chance. The noted Edmonton lawyer and former University of Alberta professor, who was convicted a decade ago of the grisly murder of his wife of 23 years, has asked the Law Society of Alberta to reinstate him as a member of the provincial bar. The 56-year-old Sychuk's case for professional reinstatement will have to get around the fact that in 1987 he fractured his 44-year-old wife's arm, punched out her teeth, blackened her eye, disfigured her face, and stabbed her 22 times in the chest. The law society's board members will decide over the next three months whether their former colleague, a prisoner currently on parole, is now of sufficiently good character to practise law.
In a brutal attack that stunned Alberta's legal community, Sychuk murdered his wife Claudia on New Year's Eve 1987, reportedly after the couple argued about a party they had attended earlier in the evening. The couple's 17-year-old son discovered his mother dead shortly after midnight on January 1, on the floor of his parents' master bedroom, with a knife buried in her neck. His father's gold scales-of-justice pendant was lying on the floor next to her body.
"Screamin' Mo," as his law students used to call him, had a history of violence and was prone to fits of fury. In November 1985, he blew a hole with a gun through the basement door of their posh Aspen Gardens home, an incident rumoured to have occurred after Claudia locked him in his private "arsenal" in the basement. He was convicted of a minor summary offence and restricted from owning a firearm. He quietly...