Man found guilty of assaulting fiancée
Judge rejects Edwin James Smith’s claim that blood was just ‘red paint’
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When police woke up Edwin James Smith to arrest him, his hands, clothes and bedding were stained with blood.
At least, the officers assumed it was blood, having just passed a significant amount of it on the floor throughout Smith’s home, on the front step outside and covering his fiancée — who was at that point on her way to the hospital with a serious laceration that had left her lip hanging down. It required 17 stitches and left a scar from the corner of her mouth to her chin.
On trial in provincial court in St. John’s earlier this month, Smith, 63, told the judge the staining on his hands could have been red paint.
“Not very credible,” is how Judge Mike Madden described that explanation.
He also rejected Smith’s suggestion that, although he didn’t remember everything about the night last September when his now-ex fiancée was injured, he may have done it by accident or in selfdefence.
There was no way the woman could have been injured while Smith was asleep, the judge said, citing a neighbour’s testimony that she had heard the woman and a man arguing before the woman began screaming. Police had no trouble waking Smith up, Madden noted, and Smith’s reaction when he caught a view of himself in a mirror as he was being arrested was nothing if not odd: “Damn, I look good,” he had said.
“His relative unconcern, evident by the comment in the bedroom, when he had what looked like blood on him, lacks the display of shock and horror one would expect when waking up unexpectedly to such a scene,” the judge said.
Madden found Smith guilty on Tuesday of aggravated assault, one of three charges the RNC laid against
Smith after arresting him that morning last fall. The judge dismissed a charge of uttering threats against the woman, finding there was not enough evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. A charge of assault was stayed, as often happens in a case where there are multiple charges related to the same incident.
Testifying via video from another room at court two weeks ago, the woman said she and Smith had spent the evening bowling before heading home, stopping at a liquor store so Smith could pick up an eight-pack of beer. At home, he drank them and went to bed, while she stayed up and watched TV, she said. At one point, when she went to check on him, he told her he would “slice her throat” if she went to sleep, she testified.
The woman said she left at that point and went to a friend’s house, returning early in the morning. She said she had leaned across Smith in the bed, reaching for cigarettes in his nightstand drawer, when he grabbed her by the hair and the mouth and dragged her through the apartment.
“How did it end?” prosecutor Paul Thistle had asked the complainant in court.
“I guess he ran out of face. My face. It was ripped open,” the woman replied.
On Tuesday, the judge said the woman’s testimony had not been without its issues: there were discrepancies between what she had said in court and what she had previously told police. However, Madden said, the woman’s assertion that it was Smith who had attacked her had not been shaken.
“There must have been an assault. It must have occurred in the home and, given the nature of the injury, it must have occurred just before police were called,” the judge said. “(She) said her attacker was Mr.
Smith; he was found by police in the home. There was no one else.”
Madden prefaced his decision with an explanation of the law when it comes to a judge’s role in assessing the credibility of witnesses, saying it’s not an easy task nor a scientific one. Judges are entitled to determine how much weight to place on inconsistencies in their evidence, particularly when a witness provides an explanation for them, he said.
Witness credibility and reliability are two different things, he explained; for example, a witness may do their best to tell the truth, but may be unable to provide accurate details.
It comes down to being satisfied, after examining the whole of the evidence, that an accused is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, he said.
Smith, who has been in custody since his arrest, will return to court next week for sentencing.