The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Trial adjourned after accused fires lawyer
A trial for a man charged with first-degree murder in the 2013 shooting of Matthew Sudds will not be going ahead in September as scheduled.
Devlin Tyson Glasgow is looking for a new lawyer after cutting ties with his previous counsel, Eugene Tan.
Glasgow, 34, appeared in Nova Scotia Supreme Court in Halifax on Thursday via a video link from the Springhill Institution, where he’s serving a sentence.
His jury trial was set for five weeks beginning Sept. 20. A lengthy pre-trial hearing was supposed to get underway next week.
Crown attorney Rick Woodburn said that even if Glasgow retains a new lawyer right away, it would be "impossible" to use the existing dates for his trial, given the issues that need to be heard in advance.
Woodburn recommended the trial be adjourned and the dates be used for pre-trial applications instead.
Associate Chief Justice Patrick Duncan told Glasgow that if the trial was adjourned, it might not happen until early 2023 because of a backlog of jury cases in the Halifax region. That means the trial would not take place within 30 months of the charge being laid, as mandated by the Supreme Court of Canada in its Jordan decision.
Glasgow was in prison in Mission, B.C., when he was arrested in the fall of 2019 and charged with murdering Sudds. He told the judge Thursday he understands there could be a lengthy delay and is prepared to wait.
“This is my life,” he said of the trial.
The judge adjourned the trial but held off on setting new dates. He ordered Glasgow to appear in court again April 29 for an update on his search for a new lawyer.
Glasgow was the second man charged in the killing of Sudds, whose body was found along Africville Road in north-end Halifax on Oct. 14, 2013. The 24-year-old Halifax man had been shot in the head.
Ricardo Jerrel Whynder, 36, will go to trial in Supreme Court in January 2022 on a charge of second-degree murder. It will be Whynder’s second trial in the case.
Whynder was arrested in 2017 and stood trial in June 2019 for first-degree murder. The jury found him not guilty as charged but guilty of second-degree murder.
The Nova Scotia Court of Appeal quashed the conviction last November and ordered a new trial on the lesser charge. The appellate panel unanimously accepted Whynder’s arguments that the conviction should be overturned because the trial judge’s instructions to the jury were flawed.
Prosecutors alleged at trial that Sudds was killed on the night of Oct. 10, 2013, shortly after getting into the front seat of a black Dodge Charger that had been rented by a female associate of Whynder.
The Crown theory was that Whynder worked in concert with Glasgow to commit the planned and deliberate murder of Sudds. It said Whynder, through text messages and phone calls, set up a meeting with Sudds in a parking lot at the corner of Young Street and Kempt Road in Halifax.
The Crown said Whynder was present in the Charger as Sudds was yanked back in his seat and driven from the parking lot to Africville Road, where he was shot and left in an overgrown ditch.
Whynder left the province with Glasgow the next day to escape liability, the Crown alleged, and lied to Sudds’ mother and police about his involvement.
The defence maintained that although Whynder admitted in a call to the province’s Rewards for Major Unsolved Crimes Program from British Columbia in March 2017 that he was in the vehicle around the time of the killing, and also told police he had information about the murder, he did not commit the offence.
The defence said the Crown did not prove Whynder did anything in relation to Sudds’ death beyond being present in the vehicle and having knowledge of the killing.