Client Acquitted by Jury -- Robbery With a Firearm

A citizen cannot be convicted on the uncorroborated word of a liar. That’s what Tyler MacDonald argued at the conclusion of this trial, and the jury agreed by acquitting the client and her co-accused of charges of robbery with a firearm, assault, assault with a weapon, assault causing bodily harm, threatening death, and unlawful confinement.

The complainant (the man who made the allegations against the client and her co-accused) told a story in his testimony at trial that he was simply hanging around in his friend’s apartment one day, waiting for the friend to come home, when the client and her co-accused visited him and suddenly took out guns and demanded money. He said they pistol-whipped him repeatedly and eventually cut and burned him with heated knives in an effort to obtain money which the complainant did not have. The complainant knew the client and her co-accused from earlier interactions and said he had no prior issues with them.

During cross examination by Mr. MacDonald, the complainant swore that he was a musician at the time of the incident and not a crack dealer. This was contradicted over two days of cross examination wherein it was shown that the complainant had keys and 24/7 access to his friend’s apartment, that this “friend” was a crack addict who stayed in his room most of the time when the complainant “visited”, that the complainant’s monthly welfare cheque was barely enough to pay for his marihuana habit, that the complainant had dealt crack in the past and had been shot by other drug dealers, and, among other things, that six men visited the complainant earlier that day to threaten him that they would beat him up or kill him unless he stopped dealing crack downtown and went back to Scarborough. After all this, the complainant still staked his credibility on the assertion that he was not a crack dealer. The certainty of this lie was solidified when the very next witness called by the Crown, under cross-examination by Mr. MacDonald’s co-counsel, told the jury that he himself was a crack addict and that the complainant was not only his dealer, but was the crack dealer for the entire building.

Further cross-examination of the complainant by Mr. MacDonald revealed many other reasons to find the complainant to be untrustworthy, including the fact that he had applied for compensation from the government for this incident as a victim of crime (and had previously won over $10,000 for being shot), and the fact that he had initially concealed from police that the six men visited him on the day of the incident and threatened to kill him. When it was suggested to the complainant that the six men were actually the people who beat, cut and burned him to make sure he got the message to leave downtown, and that he pinned the crime on the client and co-accused because he was too scared of further violence from the actual perpetrators if they were ever charged, the complainant denied this. But, by that time, there was no good reason to believe anything the complainant said.

The client and the co-accused did not need to testify in their own defence. After a brief deliberation, the jury returned verdicts of not guilty on all counts for both defendants.