Defendant denies assaulting ex-girlfriend
‘I never laid a hand on any woman in my whole life,’ Ray Newman testifies in St. John’s
Ray Newman’s lawyer, after spending an hour questioning his client on the stand Friday, summed things up with a series of direct questions.
“At any time, did you attempt to choke (the complainant)?” Brian Wentzell asked Newman. “No,” Newman replied. He gave the same answer when asked if he had put his hands on the woman’s throat, struck her or dragged her across the floor.
“I never laid a hand on any woman in my whole life,” Newman said emphatically. “Not only (the complainant), any woman.”
Newman, 40, has pleaded not guilty to assaulting and choking his ex-girlfriend during an argument at his Paradise home last September.
The pair was admittedly drunk and had begun arguing on the way home, continuing the argument inside the house.
The woman testified Newman had punched her, tried to drag her out of the house by the leg and put his hands around her neck and choked her until she blacked out. She was able to get a breath of air, she said, and punched him in the nose, causing it to bleed.
The woman said she then drove to the police station in Mount Pearl, but found nobody there, so she returned to the house and slept in the vehicle in the driveway.
Newman testified the argument had begun when he overheard the woman trying to buy cocaine in a bar, something he didn’t want in his life. He said she got upset when he told her that he was ending the relationship. She left the home and he went to bed, he said, and was later woken up by her punching him in the head.
Newman told the court he pushed the woman off him when she attacked him, and she may have injured herself on a nightstand as she fell to the floor. The court saw forensic photos of her injuries, which included bruising and swelling around her eye as well as marks on her cheek and her neck below the ear. She had vertical scratches on the centre of her chest and abrasions on one knee.
Newman said he called the police after the woman left in the vehicle, driving it even though she was drunk. It took more than 11 hours for police to respond, and when they did, they arrested him.
Newman testified Friday that when police brought him to headquarters to be fingerprinted when he was charged with the assault on his ex-girlfriend, RNC Insp. Dean Roberts — who had been the lead investigator in the Predham-newman case — was there.
“He was pretty much mocking me,” Newman said. “He was saying things like, ‘Everything’s going good for you now Ray, I see. Your life’s going great again,’ and laughing. I thought it was pretty unprofessional for a higher-up RNC officer to act that way.”
On cross-examination, Newman appeared to grow angry, firing questions back at Crown prosecutor Sean Patten.
“Was the argument heated?” Patten asked.
“Did I say it was heated?” Newman replied. “I made it clear here. No, it wasn’t heated.”
“Did it boil over at one point?” Patten later asked.
“Just because I wanted the relationship to end doesn’t mean these allegations are true,” Newman said, smiling.
In his closing submissions, Wentzell questioned why the woman had driven to the police station instead of calling 911, and he suggested her injuries weren’t consistent with the evidence she presented.
“I suggest we would not be here if his name wasn’t Raymond Newman,” Wentzell said, referring to Newman’s previous dealings with the law.
He was acquitted in 2012 of murdering his estranged wife, Chrissy Predham-newman, in her Airport Heights apartment five years earlier. During his trial, a Newfoundland and Labrador Supreme Court judge ruled to exclude a portion of the evidence presented by police, saying officers had made a mistake by not reading Newman his rights until 30 minutes into their interview with him, at which point he had already told them that he had been at his estranged wife’s apartment the day she died. Newman’s acquittal was upheld on appeal.
Patten refuted the defence’s argument that Newman had acted in self-defence, and said the fact that the woman had slept in her vehicle, something Newman acknowledged in his testimony, “speaks volumes.” Newman’s assertion that he doesn’t know how the woman was injured is unbelievable, Patten said, and taints the rest of his evidence.
When it comes to the woman driving to the police station instead of calling 911, Patten urged the court not to make assumptions.
“We have to be careful not to play into stereotypes,” he said. “This is a domestic violence situation and we can’t expect people to behave in a certain way. We can’t assume everybody in that situation would call 911.”
Judge David Orr will render his decision June 8.