Millard taps lawyer for sentencing, trial

Ravin Pillay was his co-counsel for trial in death of Tim Bosma, killer’s first murder conviction

After playing the role of lawyer, Dellen Millard plans to rehire a real one to represent him at his Feb. 12 sentencing hearing for killing Laura Babcock.

Millard also wants Ravin Pillay as his counsel when he stands trial for a third time in the spring — this time for the killing of his father, Wayne Millard, whose 2012 death was originally ruled a suicide.

Pillay was Millard’s co-counsel in Hamilton last year when a jury convicted him in the first-degree murder of Tim Bosma.

Millard represented himself at his justcompleted trial where a jury last weekend convicted him and co-accused Mark Smich of first-degree murder of Babcock.

The pair has already received automatic life sentences in both cases, with no ability to apply for parole in the Bosma murder for 25 years.

What remains is for Superior Court Justice Michael Code, the Babcock trial judge, to decide whether he should impose a consecutive or concurrent parole ineligibility period of 25 years in connection with her murder. It is not mandatory that he do so.

On Wednesday, Millard appeared in two downtown courtrooms, first to set a trial date for his father’s murder, which may move to April 1 from March 20 to accommodate Pillay’s schedule.

Then Millard was back in the court two floors below in front of Code, who had urged him to retain counsel.

“I was hoping you’d appear,” Code told Pillay. “It’s important that you be able to assist Mr. Millard.”

In 2011, the federal government amended the Criminal Code to allow judges to sentence multiple murders to consecutive parole ineligibility periods instead of concurrent.

Smich’s lawyer, Thomas Dungey, told court he plans to argue that sentencing his client to consecutive parole ineligibility periods is unconstitutional.

Code noted that issue has already been litigated in the downtown courthouse.

Superior Court Justice Ken Campbell’s decision upholding the law’s constitutionality was a “very, very thorough, well-reasoned and wellwritten judgment,” Code said, adding it was “not the kind of thing” a judge of concurrent jurisdiction would likely depart from.

Code also invited prosecutors to make submissions on what to consider when deciding parole eligibility. For instance, should he consider the character evidence presented during pretrial motions, excluded from the jury? And to what extent should he consider the Crown’s theory, not put to the jury, that there was “a larger criminal conspiracy . . . lying behind these two murders?”