Durant granted new trials for Cichocki, Dimitri murders
Ontario’s highest court rules cases should not have been tried together for Niagara man now serving life sentence
More than six years after he was sentenced to life in prison for the killings of two young women, a Niagara Falls man has been granted new trials.
In a decision released Monday, the Ontario Court of Appeal ordered new, separate trials for Michael Durant, convicted in 2012 on two counts of first-degree murder, saying the matters should not have been tried together.
Durant, now 45, was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years following a two-and-a-half month-long trial in Superior Court of Justice in Welland.
The six-man, six-woman jury deliberated for almost 65 hours over seven days before reaching its verdicts.
Durant challenged the convictions, filing an appeal several months after the trial ended. He argued Judge James Ramsay made several errors in conducting the legal proceedings.
Thirty-two-year-old Diane Dimitri was found in a ditch in Welland in August 2003. The body of Cassey Cichocki, 22, was discovered in a wooded area in the north end of Niagara Falls in January 2006.
Court documents indicated both women, whose bodies were found more than 29 months apart, died from blunt force trauma to the head. Both lived a high-risk
lifestyle and battled with substance abuse.
Evidence at trial linked Durant to each of the deceased at times reasonably proximate to the last time they were seen alive.
While the two cases have some common features, Ontario’s highest court said the trial judge was wrong to admit the evidence on each killing as evidence of a similar act on the other, and to proceed with only one trial.
The appeal court said evidence of similar fact invites jurors to draw from previous incidents that the accused has a specific character, which would then support an inference of guilt in a specific offence.
When this type of evidence is provided in an effort to prove identity, there must be a “striking similarity” between the incidents and how the offences were committed, the court said. That rules out coincidence as an explanation and allows the judge to determine whether the same person was likely responsible for those acts, it said.
That threshold was not met in Durant’s case, the appeal court said.
“There was nothing of a signature here,” Ontario Appeal Court Justice David Watt wrote in the three-member panel’s decision.
“The only cogent commonality was the profile of the deceased and this was simply not good enough.”
Also, the appeal court ruled the judge erred in refusing to dismiss a juror who knew a relative of one of the victims, and in failing to leave manslaughter as an available verdict for one of the cases.
with files from Canadian Press