New trial ordered in Galloway Boys case
Province’s highest court grants appeal for one of three convicted in 2004 killing
The Ontario Court of Appeal has ordered a new trial for a member of the notorious Galloway Boys, who was convicted of first-degree murder and attempted murder in 2009 after a multimillion-dollar, high-profile gang trial.
While the province’s highest court allowed Jason Wisdom’s appeal, it dismissed the appeals of Tyshan Riley, leader of the east-end Toronto street gang, and of Philip Atkins.
The three men were convicted of murder, attempted murder and murder to benefit a criminal organization in the shooting death of Brenton Charlton and Leonard Bell, two innocent men who were ambushed on March 3, 2004, while they were stopped at a red light at a busy Scarborough intersection.
The three men, serving life sentences, appealed their convictions on various grounds, including concerns about the fairness of the jury selection process, the judge’s charge to the jury and admissibility of some evidence.
The court rejected the grounds of appeal.
But the court agreed with Wisdom’s argument that bad character evidence about his involvement in an attempted theft/robbery of a Money Mart store, four months after the shooting, should not have been admitted at trial.
“The trial judge significantly underestimated the evidence’s potential prejudicial effect,” the judges wrote in their 48-page decision.
The judges didn’t feel the admission of the evidence brought the same prejudice to Riley and Atkins, therefore “the trial judge’s error in admitting the Money Mart evidence does not justify ordering a new trial for either of them.”
The trial judge, Ontario Superior Court Justice Michael Dambrot, al- lowed the Crown to call evidence about an attempt to steal $100,000 from a Money Mart in Pickering. The robbery never happened. After gang members went to the wrong Money Mart, they arrived at the right location to find police waiting. The police had been tipped off by wiretaps.
When police arrested the suspects, including Wisdom, they found no firearms or weapons. Riley and Atkins were in jail at the time.
The appellate judges wrote that Dambrot allowed the evidence because it demonstrated the organized nature of the gang and found the prejudice for Wisdom was not “terribly discreditable” and that a jury was not likely to “infer from his participation in a botched robbery that he committed a murder.” But the appellate court disagreed. “It had nothing more than marginal value, consisting, as it did, of evidence of unrelated criminality that formed no part of the narrative of the Charlton and Bell shooting,” reads the decision released Friday by Court of Appeal Justices Harry LaForme, David Watt and Gary Trotter.
“Far from showing a deep level of organization and trust, this evidence primarily demonstrated that Wisdom and his compatriots were quick to take advantage of a perceived opportunity to make easy money through low-level criminal activity. In other words, it primarily proved they were the sort of people willing to commit crimes.”
This is the second time this month Ontario’s top court has ordered a new trial in a street-gang case.
Last Friday, the court ordered a third trial in a first-degree murder case after finding an expert witness’s testimony about gang members with teardrop tattoos contained “inaccuracies” and even “falsehoods.”