Daily duff

On Monday, lawyers plead their case on whether or not to allow a 2010 Senate report to stand as evidence.

At one point, Duffy lawyer Donald Bayne tried to make his point for the report’s admissibility by leaning on a forgotten murder trial from the 1950s. In 1952 near Thunder Bay, Ont., miner Eric Kaipiainen shot his four-year-old son Seppo to death and then tried unsuccessfully to kill himself. Kaipiainen plead insanity, but a jury disagreed and convicted the miner, for which he received a sentence of death by hanging. The result was overturned on appeal, based on the argument that the trial should have looked at Kaipiainen’s Finnish army records. In 1944, the Northern Ontario miner had donned a Finnish uniform during a Germanallied Finnish offensive against the Soviet Union. If the trial had looked at the records, said appeal documents, the jury would have found early evidence of mental illness in Kaipainen, and might have been compelled to believe his insanity defence. On Monday, spectators and prosecutors seemed baffled by how the case might relate to that of a Senator accused of fraud.