Crime so awful even a juror felt victimized
The murder trial of Michael Rafferty in 2012 was an absolute sewer of a case, the evidence grim and unrelenting for more than two months.
The abduction of Victoria (Tori) Stafford happened on April 8, 2009, at the end of a school day amid the chattering chaos so familiar to parents the planet over, the kids at Oliver Stephens Public School being met by mums and dads or piling into a school bus or walking home on the streets of the small town of Woodstock, Ont., about 50 kilometres east of London.
But Tori was met by a stranger, a young woman named Terri-Lynne McClintic, who spun her a story about her Shih Tzu, asked if she wanted to see the puppy, and thus, holding her hand, got the little girl to the car where Rafferty was waiting.
Within three hours, Tori was dead.
She had 16 fractured ribs, two for every year of her life. She died from repeated hammer blows to the head. Her body was put in garbage bags and tossed onto a farmer’s rock pile off a gorgeous country lane near Mount Forest; it wasn’t found for 103 days.
McClintic had pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for her role in Tori’s death two years earlier.
She was the key witness against Rafferty, a man she had known only casually, but for whom her childhood of deprivation and violence had prepared her perfectly.
It was from her that jurors learned that Rafferty had raped Tori, twice actually. “T, T, please don’t let him do it again!” the little girl had cried when McClintic led her briefly away from Rafferty so she could pee.
McClintic handed her back to him, of course.
She had a last-minute change of heart shortly before the trial started. After insisting for years that Rafferty had been the one to kill Tori, McClintic abruptly said she’d done it. It didn’t particularly matter: Who was the principal, who was the party to the crime, was irrelevant if the jury found they had acted together.
The jury did just that, and convicted Rafferty of kidnapping, sexual assault and firstdegree murder. He is appealing those convictions next week.
With the verdict, their drear work done, the jurors quietly made their way back into their own lives, undoubtedly shaken by their dive into the moral swamp in which Rafferty and McClintic moved, but, for all the rest of the world knew, successfully.
That changed this week with the story, broken by Jane Sims of Postmedia in London, that one of the Rafferty jurors, a single mother of two, is claiming she suffered vicarious Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from the trial, thus is an indirect victim of crime herself and is seeking compensation.
The 57-year-old woman — her identify is forever protected, as jurors are to remain anonymous — first applied to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board but was denied, and her first appeal of that order, at the Ontario Divisional Court, also failed.
Her case at the Court of Appeal will be heard next month.
In essence, she claims “jurors are effectively ordered to participate in the process” and are indistinguishable from bystanders who witness violent crimes.
As her lawyers wrote, “The involuntariness of jurors equates with others who are victims of crime — those who are involved, not by choice, but by circumstance.”
Yet that involuntariness is the norm in the criminal courts, and the very reason that jury duty is so often called the highest civic service a citizen can perform.
No one asks to serve on a jury; one is asked to do it, and even then, only the least wily and with the best-protected jobs (which means they won’t suffer financial hardship while serving) do not evade it.
The only thanks ever comes from the trial judge. The pay is terrible. The working conditions — when not actually in court and sitting on hard chairs, you are routinely trapped with 11 of your fellows in a small room, watched over by a court officer, urged to keep your opinions to yourself and warned not to discuss the trial with anyone else — are almost as bad.
Yet from all I’ve seen in dozens of courtrooms, most people rise magnificently to the task. They take it seriously; they follow the judge’s instructions; they listen to the lawyers and weigh the evidence, however terrible, and are fair.
A former colleague, Kirk Makin, once said that you can actually physically see how jurors change: On the first day, they come to court with the posture and clothes of the schlubs that most of us are; by the third, they’re standing tall, ignoring if not overtly glaring at the TV reporters they were thrilled to have recognized on day one, and magically have acquired from God knows where a dignified mien.
One of the legal tests for what’s still called “nervous shock” in courts and tribunals goes like this: “Was it reasonably foreseeable that a person of ordinary fortitude would suffer mental injury in the circumstances?”
The answer, in the Rafferty trial, is probably “Yes — and also that this person of ordinary fortitude would be able to carry on, certainly sadder, perhaps not without difficulty, but yes.”
Hundreds of them do it every year actually, emerge from the metaphorical darkness of courthouses into the bright light of real life, forever changed, but not broken.
INVOLUNTARINESS IS ... THE VERY REASON THAT JURY DUTY IS SO OFTEN CALLED THE HIGHEST CIVIC SERVICE A CITIZEN CAN PERFORM. — CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD