Crown to address Neville jury
After a morning-long postponement, Steven Neville’s lawyers wrapped up their closing submissions to the jury Wednesday.
Bob Buckingham, who is Neville’s co-counsel along with Robert Hoskins, began a closing address to the jury Tuesday afternoon after 11 weeks of trial.
Crown prosecutors Jessica Gallant and Jason House are set to present theirs Thursday morning, barring any further delay.
The trial has been postponed a number of times to allow the lawyers and Justice Robert Stack to discuss legal issues without the jury present.
On Tuesday, Stack dismissed the jury foreman, who had broken his ankle over the weekend and had asked for time off. The judge said he wasn’t willing to force the man to postpone any medical appointments, and gave the remaining 11 jurors time to decide which of them would be the new foreperson.
Neville, now 27, is charged with second-degree murder in the death of 19-year-old Doug Flynn in 2010, as well as the attempted murder of a second man, Ryan Dwyer, during the same altercation on a Paradise street. Both Flynn and Dwyer were stabbed multiple times with a knife.
In his closing remarks, Buckingham spoke of what he said is a lack of direct evidence connecting Neville to the stabbings, pointing out none of the witnesses who took the stand at trial testified to having seen Neville with a knife that night.
Buckingham insisted Dwyer had “gone off the deep end” over an unpaid loan of $65 his brother had given Neville, and he and Flynn had mounted a “campaign of terror” against Neville.
He summarized incidents in which he said Flynn and Dwyer had chased Neville in vehicles, attempted to attack him with a baseball bat, nunchucks, brass knuckles and other weapons, and had threatened to assault his mother. Neville acted in selfdefence, Buckingham said.
“This is not a TV show where all the ends are tied up,” Buckingham told the jurors, saying they were not responsible for deciding why Dwyer turned on Neville, a former longtime friend.
The prosecutors are expected to present a different story in their closing address, insisting Neville’s attack on Flynn and Dwyer was calculated and deliberate, as evident by him showing a knife to a friend at a party in the preceding weeks and saying it was “for protection,” as well as a text conversation he had with a friend on the day Flynn and Dwyer were stabbed. Neville told her the two men were “dead, dead, dead,” and he was “stabbing them until they squirt blood.”
Neville was found guilty of the charges in a 2013 trial. The conviction was later overturned and a new trial ordered by the Supreme Court of Canada, after the court found there were problems with the instructions to the jury from the judge.
After Gallant and House finish their closing submissions, Stack will give his instructions to the jurors before sequestering them to deliberate.