Lawyer says kidney failure was a blessing in disguise
Edward Sapiano says the ‘wonderful, hellish experience’ he faced forced him to redefine himself
Until his life was on the line, Edward Sapiano believed he was invincible. Now, he knows it.
“I like to joke, and a joke has a grain of truth, I am the next step in human evolution,” the 54-year-old Toronto criminal defence lawyer says.
“When I’m in court, my adversaries are merely biological. I am superior.”
For Sapiano, a two-year comeback in the making is complete.
He’s busy rattling off his greatest hits — from the Toronto 18 terrorism trial to his courtroom showdown more than a decade ago with a Superior Court judge he argued was biased against all defendants — when Sapiano realizes he missed his exit on Highway 401about half an hour ago.
It’s been just over a week since finishing his work on the first-degree murder trial of Michael Davani and former NCAA basketball player Alwayne Bigby.
Sapiano is heading to Gores Landing, Ont., normally a1.5-hour drive east of the city, where he owns a farm and forest on his 51-hectare property.
While Bigby was acquitted, a jury found Sapiano’s client Davani guilty of first-degree murder in the 2014 fatal shooting of Andrea White. The seven-week trial was Sapiano’s first while on 24-hour dialysis, after a break from his law practice caused by kidney failure.
The sight of Sapiano in a courtroom may not thrill judges and cops — he says he’s made a career of “taking on power” — but no one is happier to see him than his two goats, Beatrice and Princess, as he arrives at his farm.
“They’re very playful. They’re like children,” says Sapiano as he feeds his goats bits of Tostitos chips. “I go for walks, I can take them out of here and they’ll follow me.”
For two years, the goats, as well as Sapiano’s eight chickens, were his main companions.
After the diagnosis forced him off the Jennifer Pan murder trial in August 2014, Sapiano says he went through “a wonderful, hellish experience.”
“I had to redefine myself. I had created Edward Sapiano and then suddenly I’m taken out for two years,” he says. “I think everybody should endure extreme bodily dysfunction and pain for a period of time because it teaches you so much.”
With a beard stretching down to his chest and his robes traded for jeans, he was sitting at a bus stop along Queen St. one day when he began to violently vomit.
“I look up. There’s a whole class of kids, about 8 years old, being led by their teacher, looking at me,” he says. “There’s a homeless guy on the other side of the street looking at me curiously and I realize from the perspective of children and other people, there’s no difference between me and that homeless guy who’s been making bad decisions his whole life long.”
Having already owned his farm for a year, this seemed like the perfect time to escape.
“I felt uncomfortable being in Toronto for that period because people would look at me and think that I drank too much, whereas my goats didn’t mind,” Sapiano says.
Sequestered on his farm with endless free time, he took on project after project. He learned to weld, built a workshop for his tools, took up beekeeping and made honey.
Just as he’s learned to charm juries with his energetic deliveries, Sapiano says he’s also warmed himself to nature.
“I have a working relationship with a family of ravens,” he says, at first seemingly in jest before it becomes apparent he is serious. “I leave them chicken eggs and in return they keep the hawks away from my property, thereby protecting the chickens. It’s a symbiotic relationship.”
He says he’s always had an affinity for the outdoors, having owned another 80-hectare forest near Peterborough for decades. As he motors through the forest on one of his ATVs, Sapiano breathes in the air, a smell he says you just can’t get in the city.
“I used to laugh at myself these last two years because my bodily dysfunction, the pain and enduring all this, it was like a Greek tragedy,” he says. “Me lying on my forest floor violently shaking and vomiting, with my goats staring at me. And it’s a beautiful place to be, especially if you’re violently vomiting.”
Now that he’s back in the courtroom, Sapiano still commutes to the farm most weekends from his downtown loft and plans to stay all summer preparing for his next murder trial, which is set to begin in September.
Doctors have given him two dialysis machines, one for each location, that rest on a countertop next to his bed. Every evening at 9 p.m., Sapiano slips on a face mask and plugs a small hose from the machine, roughly the size of a printer, into a hole in his abdomen, which pumps 10 litres of dialysis through him during the night.
It leaves two litres of dialysis inside him when he wakes up at 6 a.m. and by around noon, he’ll use a manual system, which he takes with him on the go, to drain the liquid and pump a fresh batch into his body.
This ritual is what keeps Sapiano alive until he potentially receives a kidney transplant. He’s on a waiting list to receive one from a deceased donor, but has turned down offers from friends and family because he doesn’t want to feel indebted to them for the rest of his life.
Sapiano’s dialysis routine allowed him to return to the courtroom this past spring pain-free.
“When everyone else is going to lunch, I go to a room in the courthouse . . . and I plug into this apparatus,” Sapiano says.
David Wilson, his co-counsel representing Davani, said he figured he’d see a change in Sapiano since the last time the two teamed up for a murder trial in 2011.
Wilson recalled Sapiano’s dogged work ethic and high-octane energy back then, but he wasn’t sure he’d see it this go-round. He said he was ex- pecting Sapiano to need breaks midtrial or at least a reduced workload.
“But that really wasn’t the case. He was basically his normal self,” Wilson said. “That’s really who he is and how he practises. That’s generally the way he presents to juries, is as this larger-than-life advocate, almost like some character you’d see on television. But he’s a real lawyer. It’s not just theatre.”
Wilson said he became concerned once early on in the trial as Sapiano cross-examined a witness. He had begun sweating and his stomach was bothering him, to the point Sapiano requested permission from the judge to sit down as he finished his questioning.
But aside from that brief spell lasting about five minutes, Sapiano says his special circumstances were kept hidden during the trial.
“At court, it’s very important to me that this is an invisible handicap,” he says. “At no time did I tell the judge I need another hour, at no time was the court schedule affected by my handicap. At no time did the jury become aware that I’ve got this issue. I don’t want it costing the court any time.”
Despite his client’s conviction, a verdict he called “predictable,” Sapiano says he feels the jury got it right in the murder trial, which he says was “unwinnable.”
“It was a disappointing trial for my great return,” he admits. “I would’ve liked to have come back to a trial where I could feel self-righteous.”
But he views the case as a learning experience, and because of this, a positive experience.
“Life had been too easy for me,” Sapiano says. “There’s no such thing as a bad experience so long as you survive it.”
He says his future in the legal profession depends on two factors: his health and his enjoyment. He says he could see himself practising for another decade, but wouldn’t turn down a murder trial 10 years from now if he’s still enthusiastic enough to take it on.
While he takes his health more seriously now — he hadn’t been to a doctor in a decade before his kidney failure — he also vows he won’t interrupt a trial to receive a kidney transplant should that time come.
But as unbelievable as it sounds, today, Sapiano says he’s grateful for his kidney failure.
“You could stick a knife in my chest and as long as I survive it, it’s a wonderful experience because I survived it,” he says. “Every day above ground is a damn good day.”
“When everyone else is going to lunch, I go to a room in the courthouse . . . and I plug into this apparatus.” EDWARD SAPIANO CRIMINAL DEFENCE LAWYER