It is a remarkably subversive thing that Notley has done, by appointing a cabinet of just 12 members. Andrew Coyne,
Judge says provocation defence valid in heat of moment, not months later
He wasn’t ever angry at his ex, Bridget Takyi, no sir, merely upset; he was planning only to burn Takyi’s car, not her, and all the details of how he inflicted 25 knife wounds to her and set her body on fire he claims not to remember.
That was Emmanuel Owusu-Ansah’s explanation for how the remains of the lovely 27-year-old Takyi came to be found on a road outside her mother’s Etobicoke, Ont., apartment on Jan. 19, 2013.
It is a “preposterous” story, and the jurors who will soon have charge of the case “should not accept any of it …
“The only value his story has is to show he isn’t being truthful,” said a scornful prosecutor, Rob Kenny.
Kenny was making the closing address in the murder trial of Owusu-Ansah, who has admitted killing Takyi, while also simultaneously denying any specific memory of the crime.
The 32-year-old, an immigrant from Ghana, is pleading not guilty to first-degree murder, with his lawyer, Scott Reid, Monday asking the jurors to find Owusu-Ansah guilty instead of the lesser offence of manslaughter.
Reid maintains that the couple’s volatile relationship, particularly a fight six weeks before which saw Owusu-Ansah facing charges and Takyi living in hiding with their two young sons, played a significant role in his client’s mindset.
Owusu-Ansah, he said, feared that if he were convicted on those charges he could face deportation, and in addition, was in “anguish” at the prospect of never seeing his children again.
As well, Owusu-Ansah was being tortured by a series of profane, anonymous and threatening texts in November, all promising he would end up in jail or be deported.
Takyi, Reid said, was likely involved in creating those texts, and wanted Owusu-Ansah “out of their lives.”
Desperate to see his sons, riven with fear, Owusu-Ansah wanted only to lash out at Takyi by either slashing the tires on her car or burning it, Reid said.
But she was on her way to work by the time Owusu-Ansah arrived at her mother’s parking lot. Takyi saw and took the knife he’d taken with him, and they ended up quarrelling, with Takyi allegedly lashing out with the knife and stabbing Owusu-Ansah, in the leg, first.
“Emmanuel was upset with Bridget,” Reid said, “but he didn’t go there to kill her”; he was provoked by the stabbing.
“Someone may tell you what happened in (November and December of 2012) has nothing to do with what happened in January,” Reid snapped. “That is simply not true.”
That was a direct shot at what presiding Ontario Superior Court Justice Eugene Ewaschuk had just told the jurors — that a provocation defence is valid only when the crime is committed “in the heat of passion caused by sudden provocation” that happens in the “moments, not months, before.”
Ewaschuk will give the jurors final instructions on the law of provocation and other issues Wednesday, after which they’re expected to begin their deliberations. Jurors are to follow a judge’s marching orders on the law.
Reid’s portrait of a father in purported anguish clashed sharply with the picture prosecutor Kenny painted of Owusu-Ansah as a man who was seething with fury and hatred for the woman who had defied him, called Toronto police after their December 2012 fight, was keeping his children from him and ignoring his calls and messages.
“He was angry,” Kenny said. “He hated Bridget … that’s why he risked his freedom,” broke virtually all the significant conditions of his earlier release on the domestic charges, stalked her by phone and in person, and even booked a few days off so he’d be free to deceive his surety about his whereabouts and “hunt her down.”
Owusu-Ansah armed himself in advance, Kenny reminded the jurors — by buying a knife and a canister of gas — and then attacked Takyi with such power that he “chipped pieces of bone from her skull.” That, and the burning of her body, is evidence of Owusu-Ansah’s hatred for the woman he persistently called, when he testified at trial, “the mother of my children.”
It was “a final indignity that causes more hurt to the ones who love her (Takyi),” Kenny said.
In fact, Owusu-Ansah had another child, also a son, by another woman, and in addition to her and Takyi, had another girlfriend on the go, as well, at the time of his arrest.
As for the injuries Owusu-Ansah suffered, Kenny said, it was because he attacked Takyi “with such fury” that he “cut himself in the process.”
He mocked Owusu-Ansah’s purported blackout as one of convenience, pointing out that he gave remarkably detailed information in his testimony about the lead-up to his lethal encounter with Takyi, “until the point where he inflicts 25 knife wounds on Bridget Takyi,” and that he failed to mention any lack of memory to doctors at the hospital where he was treated.
Takyi had “changed her whole life and the lives of her children” to escape Owusu-Ansah after the December fight, moved to a women’s shelter and followed police-recommended safety precautions.
But her boys couldn’t stay at the shelter without adult supervision, so when she worked on weekends, she took them to her mother’s. And that’s where Owusu-Ansah found her, the woman he ponderously called the mother of his children, and effectively orphaned them.
The trial will resume on Wednesday.