Justice was served for child killer
It was a poochy appeal and the Ontario Court of Appeal treated it like the cur it was, dismissing it without having heard a word from Crown prosecutors.
Justice John Laskin politely thanked defence lawyer Paul Calarco for having done a fine job with a difficult case — this is the lingua franca for those who work in the law — but then basically said just that.
The court will release its reasons later.
Unusually, for the appeal court is a refined sort of joint, the packed gallery, filled with family and friends of a dead little girl who was part-Tomboy and part-girly-girl, burst into applause.
This was the appeal of Michael Rafferty, who with Terri-Lynne McClintic, abducted and killed eight-yearold Victoria (Tori) Stafford on April 8, 2009.
The little girl was lured by McClintic, who asked her if she’d like to see her puppy, to Rafferty’s waiting car on her way home from school in Woodstock, Ont.
Though her body wasn’t found for 103 days — decomposition meant it was impossible to tell whether she had been raped or not — she was dead, her skull crushed by repeated hammer blows and 16 of her ribs broken, within hours of her abduction.
It took nearly as long for justice to be almost written in stone — theoretically, Rafferty’s lawyers could seek leave to appeal from the Supreme Court of Canada, but such pleas are rarely granted — as Victoria was alive.
Rafferty was convicted on May 11, 2012.
McClintic pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for her role in the slaying two years before that.
Yet it took almost four years for the case to wend its way to Monday’s appeal, remarkable given that in December 2013, the late appeal court Justice Marc Rosenberg was “case-managing” the file and saying in a ruling that “it is in the public interest and the interest of justice that this appeal proceed to hearing as soon as possible.”
Rosenberg was tragically diagnosed about six months later with brain cancer, and died in August of last year, but Calarco told Postmedia reporter Randy Richmond earlier this year that Rosenberg’s death wasn’t a factor in the length of time the case took.
Calarco was arguing that the original trial judge, Thomas Heeney of the Ontario Superior Court, had made three legal errors, each of which was “sufficiently serious to warrant a new trial” for the 35-year-old Rafferty — plus a fourth error that Calarco said magnified the damage done by the others.
The errors were all tied in one form or another to McClintic’s shifting story of who actually killed the little girl.
For almost three years after her arrest, McClintic, just 18 at the time Tori died, insisted that Rafferty was the killer.
It was also only her testimony that cast the crime as a sexually motivated one and Rafferty as a child rapist.
Suddenly, on the eve of her appearance as the chief witness at Rafferty’s trial, she changed her story and abruptly confessed that she was the one who had wielded the hammer.
Basically, the lawyer said, Heeney should have given the jurors the chance to convict Rafferty merely as an accessory after the fact to the murder, that he shouldn’t have edited her videotaped statement to police because what was edited out was her cavalier lying and, most importantly, that the judge should have told the jurors McClintic was a dangerous witness by giving them what’s called a Vetrovec warning about her.
Yet Rafferty’s own trial lawyer, Dirk Derstine, was adamant that Heeney not give such a warning to the jury about McClintic.
Her new story of what happened, of course, was favourable to his client, and in fact allowed Derstine to vigorously cross-examine McClintic and insist that at last, she was telling the truth. He even suggested McClintic had offered the little girl to Rafferty as a sexual “gift,” but that he refused it.
And yet, much of McClintic’s evidence was independently corroborated — she led police to the little girl’s body — and even when she was pointing to Rafferty as the physical killer, she always admitted her own guilt in luring Tori away, failing to protect her, helping in the cleanup and burial and in her betrayal of the little girl’s trust, as Tori looked to her for help in the last moments of her life.
And that’s why trial judges are owed the deference they get from appeal courts: After all, they were there, heard the evidence and saw the witnesses.
Michael Rafferty got a fair trial. If he didn’t get a perfect one, as his lawyer essentially argued he should have, so be it. None of us gets to have that.
THE ERRORS WERE ALL TIED IN ONE FORM OR ANOTHER TO McCLINTIC’S SHIFTING STORY OF WHO ACTUALLY KILLED THE LITTLE GIRL.
— COLUMNIST CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD