Homicide

Identification and alternate suspect.

Eyewitness identification is at once the least reliable and the most persuasive evidence the criminal law admits. That combination accounts for a large share of the wrongful convictions on record in Canada.

In one matter, a young man was killed with an ice pick following an altercation outside a party, and several witnesses identified our client. Cross-examination undermined those identifications, and we established that another individual had carried out a strikingly similar ice-pick attack in the preceding months. The jury acquitted.

In another, a series of street robberies at gunpoint: every complainant had seen the robber at close range, and no two of them described the same person or the same weapon. Acquitted on all counts.

Causation, intent, and the space between murder and manslaughter.

Murder requires a specific state of mind. Manslaughter doesn’t. Between them lies the territory where most homicide trials are decided: intoxication, provocation, self-defence, defence of another, the reliability of the pathology evidence, and whether the act alleged in fact caused the death.

A prosecution that can’t establish intent beyond a reasonable doubt is a prosecution with a very different exposure attached to it.

Preparation is measured in months.

Homicide disclosure runs to tens of thousands of pages: statements, surveillance, wiretap, cell tower and forensic material. Every page of it has to be read, because the defence is somewhere inside it.

It’s slow work and there’s no shortcut. Be sceptical of any lawyer who offers you a theory of a homicide case at the first meeting. We won’t.

A word about the police interview.

In homicide investigations the interview often runs for hours, conducted by officers trained specifically to get statements. It isn’t there to hear your side.

You’re entitled to say nothing. Say nothing.