Conviction overturned, new murder trial ordered

VANCOUVER — British Columbia’s top court has overturned a second-degree murder conviction against a man who was found guilty of stabbing a good Samaritan in downtown Vancouver.

The Appeal Court of British Columbia ordered a new trial in the case of Kenneth Williams, who was handed a life sentence in June 2017 with no chance of parole for 10 years.

B.C. Supreme Court heard 28-year-old Robert Smith was killed when he got out of a cab and tried to intervene in a fight that broke out between the driver and Williams after Williams hit or kicked the vehicle while walking down the street.

The Appeal Court said the trial judge’s failure to respond adequately to a question from the jury amounted to a miscarriage of justice.

Williams relied on a defence of intoxication to raise a reasonable doubt about whether he intended to stab Smith to death. The ruling says that while the issue of his having consumed a considerable amount of alcohol on the evening of the alleged offence was not contested, there was no direct evidence regarding his activities during a 90-minute period between when he left a restaurant and the stabbing.

During their deliberations, jurors asked if they could consider whether Williams continued to drink during that period and the role, if any, the “unaccounted-for time” could play in their decision-making.

“The trial judge failed to answer the jury’s question correctly and completely,” Justice Gregory Fitch wrote in the Appeal Court decision.

It says the judge’s reply that it was up to jurors to draw whatever inferences they chose prejudiced Williams’s intoxication defence and was unlikely to resolve their confusion.