JURY ACQUITS HOMEOWNER OF MURDER IN SHOOTING OF INDIGENOUS MAN.
Man’s death seen as self-defence in acquittal
HAMILTON, ONT. •To tears of relief from one side of a small courtroom and muttered profanities from the other, a jury has acquitted Peter Khill in the shotgun shooting death of Jon Styres.
The verdict came early Wednesday here after about eight hours of deliberation.
Khill had been charged with second-degree murder in the Feb. 4, 2016, shooting, but jurors also could have convicted him of the lesser offence of manslaughter if they found he lacked the requisite intent for murder.
Instead, by their verdict, the jury accepted Khill’s explanation that he had shot Styres, an Indigenous man from the nearby Six Nations reserve, in self-defence.
Some supporters of the Styres’ family, including the mother of Styres’ two children, stormed out of the courtroom, calling the verdict “f---ing bullshit.”
But Styres’ mother Debra sat in her wheelchair, quietly weeping.
Later, when Ontario Superior Court Judge Stephen Glithero made a few remarks before leaving, he appeared to be addressing her particularly when he said he knew how “tough emotionally” the trial had been for people, and thanked them for keeping calm.
In his statement to the first Hamilton Police officer on scene minutes after the shooting and throughout his daylong testimony in the witness stand about 16 months later, the 28-year-old Khill maintained that on that pitchblack morning outside his rural home, he believed Styres had been pointing a gun at him and that he believed if he didn’t shoot him, he would be shot.
“This ought not to be taken as any form of authorization for the use of deadly force to protect property,” Khill’s lawyer, Jeff Manishen, told reporters after the verdict.
“This was not about someone stealing a truck and he shot him to save the truck. That was not the evidence here,” Manishen said, and it wasn’t.
Khill was steadfast that he shot only because after yelling “Hey! Hands up!” to Styres, who had broken into Khill’s truck, the 29-year-old had clasped his hands together and raised them to gun height.
What happened was his “worst nightmare,” Khill said in his testimony: The man backed away from the truck, “I thought the person was pointing a gun at me. … It was a life or death situation. If I didn’t shoot, I felt I was going to be shot.”
Styres, in fact, didn’t have a gun. He died in the mud of Khill’s driveway, a crater in his chest and another in his shoulder from two shotgun blasts.
Virtually every witness at trial testified that Khill’s house, on a country road just outside Hamilton, was in complete darkness. This stretch of Highway 56 has no street lighting and it was a moonless night.
The two men, strangers, would have had at best brief glimpses of the other’s silhouette.
Khill was awakened about 3 in the morning by Millie Benko, then his girlfriend and now his wife, who heard two loud knocks or bangs. Khill heard the next two, ran to the bedroom window, which overlooks the driveway, and saw that the radio lights in his truck were on.
The couple were on edge already: Khill travels for business frequently, and the week before the shooting, Benko heard someone trying to open the alarmed keypad to the house. When he returned from the road, Khill changed the keypad combination.
He is a former reservist in the Canadian army — he served four years part-time in a stint that ended in 2011 — and his former military service and training was central to his claim of self-defence, his lawyer said.
Reasonableness is at the core of the Canadian criminal law on self-defence: Was a person’s fear that he or someone else was in danger a reasonable fear; were his actions likely to be judged reasonable by a so-called “reasonable person”?
A few hours into their deliberations, the jurors asked the judge a question that suggested they had got to the nub of the issue quickly: They asked if the definition of a reasonable person they’d been given meant the person’s “everyday nature” or in “this situation, alone.”
The judge told them the answer was a reasonable person, in these circumstances, with the attributes of Khill.
Manishen said the case should give Ottawa reason to rethink its proposal to do away with “peremptory challenges”— when either a prosecutor or defence lawyer can “challenge” a prospective juror for no given reason but the cut of his jib — in the wake of the verdict in the Gerald Stanley case.
The Saskatchewan farmer was acquitted of seconddegree murder last February in the 2016 shooting death of a 22-year-old Indigenous man named Colten Boushie. The verdict was decried by Indigenous leaders and saw protests in cities across Canada.
Critics claimed the defence lawyer had used his peremptory challenges to rid the jury of visibly Aboriginals.
But in the Khill case, lawyers also were allowed to challenge potential jurors for cause — racial bias — which meant they were asked if the fact that Styres was Indigenous and Khill was white would prevent them from judging the evidence fairly.
Three potential jurors actually disqualified themselves for this reason, and, Manishen said, the process should provide “everyone in the system” with the confidence that those who swore an oath that they could be impartial meant it.
Manishen, a veteran prosecutor and defence lawyer both, said challenge for cause is “an excellent approach to be able to dispel” any suggestion race played a role in the case. He said further the government’s proposal to do away with peremptory challenges is “wrong-headed.”
When the judge told Khill “you are free to leave,” the remarkably composed young man thanked him.
Once the jurors were out of the room, however, he hugged his weeping wife, now pregnant with their first baby, for several long minutes before being ushered out of the building by uniformed officers.
IF I DIDN’T SHOOT, I FELT I WAS GOING TO BE SHOT.