Man who bit his drinking buddy’s ear off loses appeal

Drinking buddy doesn’t remember assault that resulted in friend losing ear

Stephen Lawrence woke up one morning and couldn’t remember what happened the night before.

So he texted the pal he’d been drinking with saying he couldn’t recall coming home and hoped he hadn’t been a “super a — hole last night.”

His likely former friend texted back that Lawrence had bitten off his ear and he might lose it, which weeks later, he did.

“O f--- me,” Lawrence replied that morning in November 2015.

The Court of Appeal for Ontario apparently agreed with Lawrence’s assessment in a decision released Thursday.

A three-judge panel upheld his 2017 conviction on a charge of aggravated assault, for which he was sentenced to nine months in jail and two years of probation.

“He was disappointed in the result but he’s moving on with his life,” lawyer Ian Carter, who argued the appeal, said of his 43-year-old client.

The appeal court swiftly set out the background of the bloody night.

Lawrence and the victim, who isn’t identified in the decision, were drinking together at the latter’s house. Lawrence was “severely intoxicated” but the victim, who had to work the next day, drank moderately.

When his guest became “boisterous,” he asked him to “simmer down.”

Instead, when the host returned from a bathroom break, Lawrence knocked him to the ground and bit off a large portion of his ear, the appeal court decision said, then spat it out onto a bar. Yelling for Lawrence to leave, the victim staunched the blood with paper towels, put his severed ear on ice in a plastic bag and went to the hospital where it was sewn back on.

“Unfortunately for the complainant, weeks later his reattached ear fell off,” the appeal court noted.

Lawrence told police that he couldn’t recall what happened at the victim’s house but confirmed there was no one else there and it was “obviously” him and he was “not denying it.”

His defence at trial was that he was so drunk that night he couldn’t remember what happened or how his friend got hurt. The Crown couldn’t establish that he had the foresight of bodily harm or that he wasn’t acting in self-defence, trial counsel argued.

Ontario Court Judge Diane Lahaie didn’t buy it, finding the complainant’s account was “credible and reliable.” She was left with no doubt that Lawrence had bitten off the ear.

Lawrence appealed, arguing that the judge had failed to resolve inconsistencies in the victim’s testimony and engaged in “impermissible speculation” on how the ear was severed without expert evidence that it was caused by a bite.

The appeal court cut off that argument, finding that the judge considered and rejected the alleged inconsistency.

The appeal court panel said the victim never claimed to have a specific memory of his ear being bitten off and pointed to his answer when the Crown asked him what happened.

“He had, before I knew it he had, my ear was bitten off and I, I felt the side of my head and I could feel the blood, so there was a roll of paper towels on a bookshelf directly in front of it, which I put on the ear, ’cause the blood was running down my face, and then I, I started yelling at him to get out of the house,” he testified.

“And do you remember at what point you realized that it was your ear?” the Crown inquired.

“Well, when I felt the blood running down the side of my face, I had a sharp pain,” the victim said.

The appeal court found that Lahaie didn’t speculate but accepted the victim’s “uncontradicted” testimony, which included his evidence that Lawrence spat out the ear.

“Although the complainant’s appearance in court and the photographs could not independently establish a human bite, they were consistent with the complainant’s testimony,” the appeal court panel concluded.