Life Sentence by Christie Blatchford

Author:Christie Blatchford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2016-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

R v GHOMESHI, ETC.

“We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”

—FROM ARTHUR MILLER’S THE CRUCIBLE

WHEN ON FEBRUARY 11, 2016, lawyers in the Jian Ghomeshi sexual assault trial finished their closing submissions, Ontario Court judge Bill Horkins said that he was taking some time to render his decision.

Once one of the biggest names at the CBC, Ghomeshi was pleading not guilty to four counts of sex assault and one of choking with intent to overcome resistance, with a separate trial on another charge, a sexual assault that allegedly occurred at the network’s Front Street West Toronto headquarters, slated for that June.

That case was resolved a month early with a peace bond. In exchange for a promise to “keep the peace and be of good behaviour” and an apology to the complainant, writer and former Q colleague Kathryn Borel, prosecutors withdrew the charge, leaving Ghomeshi without a criminal record.

The trial had been brief, pointed, and for the three female complainants, little short of disastrous.

Yet there was Horkins saying, as though the weighty nature of the task before him was terribly obvious, “It won’t come as any surprise to counsel that I’m going to reserve judgment on this matter.” He added that he’d come back with his decision on the next scheduled return date for the case—forty-two days later.

Now, there was a time not so long ago when there sat in the province of Ontario a judge or two, probably never more than that, who not only would have had the self-confidence to render an immediate decision from the bench, but also might have had the stones to tell Ghomeshi’s lawyers, Marie Henein and Danielle Robitaille, that they needn’t bother with a closing address at all, thanks very much.

For instance, when Robitaille, who handled the first part of the defence submission, got to her feet, Eugene Ewaschuk (until recently a judge of the Ontario Superior Court) or the late Dave Humphrey (of the same court) might have said, “Sit down, Ms. Robitaille,” looked over to prosecutor Mike Callaghan, who had already made his sad final arguments, and chirped, “Got anything else, Mr. Callaghan?”

And when Callaghan, whose entire case had been knocked out from under him by his own duplicitous complainants, inevitably replied that he didn’t, Ewaschuk or Humphrey may well have acquitted the fallen CBC star on the spot.

What either judge might have said would have gone something like this: “This was an interesting trial in which three women testified.

“They all recounted aberrant and frightening aggression by the accused. The similarity in their accounts makes me think what they described might have happened, but that’s not the issue before me or the test to be applied.

“As witnesses at a criminal trial, each was to varying degrees and for different reasons untrustworthy. Each makes me unsure of their evidence.

“To find the accused guilty, I must be much more certain than I am that the Crown has established the elements of the offences charged beyond a reasonable doubt.

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