Media interest in Duffy trial was ‘daunting,’ lawyer says
The lawyer who successfully defended Sen. Mike Duffy shared details on Sunday of what is was like to deal with the “daunting ” level of media interest during his client’s politically charged trial.
Speaking at the Canadian Bar Association conference, Donald Bayne recalled the pressure of walking to the Ottawa courthouse on the trial’s opening day through a gauntlet of reporters and news cameras.
Before reaching the mob, Bayne and Duffy, a former journalist, had an understanding to stay mum amid the inevitable barrage of questions.
But the plan almost unravelled as the “moving sea” of microphones and cameras quickly closed in on them, Bayne recounted Sunday to an audience of lawyers.
“Mike turned to me, and this was on national television with every news agency in the country there, live ... and he blurted out, ‘Don, why don’t we just give them 10 minutes?’ ” Bayne said.
“I had to turn to my client angrily and say, ‘No, keep moving.’ ”
He said the intensity of that moment almost knocked Duffy off a game plan the senator had stuck to for about two years despite being hit by waves of negative publicity. Duffy’s strategy was to keep silent in public until his day in court.
“The honest answer is it’s daunting,” Bayne replied when asked during the conference what it was like for him, as a lawyer, to enter such a situation.
In April, Duffy was acquitted of 31 charges of fraud, breach of trust and bribery.
The veteran attorney shared the anecdote during his appearance on a panel discussion called Litigating in the Court of Public Opinion, which also featured Crown counsel Jocelyn Speyer.
Speyer, who represented the Crown during the Shafia family’s murder-conviction appeal and the Ashley Smith inquest, said that, as a lawyer, it’s critical to plan ahead on how to deal with the media during high-profile cases.
She recalled how Crown lawyers arrived at the courthouse early in the morning — before reporters — ahead of the Ashley Smith inquest.
The heightened public interest in Duffy’s case was unique because it was a political trial mostly covered by national political journalists, rather than court reporters, Bayne said.
Bayne said the added element of such a trial is that he had to manage a “public narrative” to the extent that he could.
“When the media develop a storyline, that’s a ship like a cruise liner,” Bayne said. “That’s very hard to turn around. They don’t like changing the storyline. And the storyline on Duffy from Day 1 was corrupt, greedy, fat, easily cartooned man.”
He said he tried to change the storyline on Duffy by calling a news conference in October 2013, almost a year before his client was charged. The goal was to respond to Duffy’s looming suspension from the Senate by publicly releasing some pieces of evidence, he said.
The result of his effort was marginally successful at best, he said.
“I, frankly, never thought there was a criminal case against Mike Duffy, and I hoped that we could change the narrative in the Senate, who were driving this message of scandal and impropriety,” he said.
“And if we could change it there, we could stop the criminal process.”