Man asks court to overturn conviction in 2015 Lee murder
All three men found guilty in Reno Lee’s 2015 shooting death have filed notices of appeal.
Within days of a jury’s March 2 verdict finding Andrew Bellegarde, 24, Bronson Gordon, 33, and Daniel Theodore, 34, guilty of first-degree murder, both Bellegarde and Theodore filed appeals. Only Gordon was found not guilty of offering an indignity to human remains in relation to the dismemberment of Lee’s body.
All three received the mandatory punishment: life in prison with no parole eligibility for at least 25 years.
This week, Gordon — through lawyer Marianna Jasper — filed his notice of appeal with the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, asking the province’s top court to overturn his conviction. If the court orders a new trial, Gordon — like Bellegarde and Theodore — wants it before a judge and jury.
During a seven-week trial, the jury heard from witnesses who said Lee was initially confined at Gordon’s Angus Street apartment on April 16, 2015, before being taken to the basement of a house on Garnet Street where he was bound and gagged. Sometime during the night, he was shot twice in the head and his body decapitated and dismembered.
His remains were found later that month in a shallow grave on the Star Blanket First Nation.
Neither Bellegarde nor Theodore took the stand at trial, but Gordon testified in his own defence, claiming he knew nothing about any plot to kill Lee.
But the Crown successfully argued that evidence showed all three men were involved in planning the murder or — in Bellegarde and Theodore’s cases — actively participated in Lee’s killing in the course of his unlawful confinement.
Bellegarde and Theodore each filed short handwritten notices of appeal on their own behalf.
Gordon’s notice of appeal dwarfed those of the other two men, containing numerous grounds and reasons for appeal, alleging the judge made a variety of errors in her lengthy charge to the jury and claiming the verdict was unreasonable.
Jasper — who is only representing Gordon at this stage for the purposes of filing of the appeal — pointed to the length of the charge (approximately 300 pages), claiming it was “unduly long ” and was “slanted towards the Crown’s case.” She added the charge, in Gordon’s view, omitted references he believed were important to his case, such as allegations of police coaching of witnesses during interviews.
Gordon also intends to argue the jury wasn’t provided with directions regarding the inadmissibility of certain pieces of evidence that dealt with allegations Gordon was in a position to give directions to the others involved.
Jasper also wrote Dawson erred “when she failed to provide a functionally adequate and balanced jury charge.”
She wrote that the judge was wrong to provide “a minute recitation of the evidence relied upon by the Crown whilst failing to relate key evidence to the defence theory.”
Jasper claimed the error led to the jury being “implicitly invited ... to disregard defence counsel’s submissions.”
Gordon intends to argue as well that the jury could not have reasonably found him guilty of firstdegree murder while simultaneously finding a reasonable doubt about his participation in the dismemberment.