Murder trial jurors staged ‘small mutiny’
Drinking before deliberations not enough to set aside verdicts in Gehl case
KITCHENER — A report of some jurors drinking in a hotel room the night before deliberations began is not enough to order a new trial in the murder of Nadia Gehl, Ontario’s highest court has ruled.
In a 48-page recap and ruling on the case released on Monday, the Ontario Court of Appeal rejected arguments put forward by lawyers for Ron Cyr, Dennis Zvolensky and Nashat Qahwash.
The three men were convicted of first-degree murder in the execution-style shooting of Gehl in Kitchener in 2009.
The killers gave several reasons why the verdicts should be overturned, including the fact the jury engaged in “unsupervised late night fraternization” and drank alcohol during and after dinner.
One frustrated juror, outside for a smoke, told a court services officer, “I don’t give a f--what the judge says,” the Court of Appeal wrote in its recap.
The trial lasted 14 weeks, almost twice as long as expected.
“By the end of the trial, the strain was starting to show,” the Court of Appeal wrote.
The trial judge did not finish charging the Hamilton jury until past 8 p.m. on a Saturday and when jurors arrived at their hotel, some wanted a drink. Since deliberations were set to begin the next morning, a
court services officer said a drink wouldn’t be wise.
“Some of the jurors reacted strongly to this,” the court wrote. The court officer reported a “small mutiny” with half the jurors acting like “schoolchildren.”
He agreed to let them “unwind and decompress,” but told them they should have no more than two drinks. They were taken to a private room off the main floor of the hotel bar, where they stayed for about two hours. Two court officers stayed outside the room.
“Neither could hear what the jurors were saying or any conversation with the server who took their drink orders, but they later said the jurors appeared jovial,” the court wrote. “Neither could recall which jurors drank alcohol or how much, although they said some of the jurors had two or three drinks.”
Then, four to six jurors went to a room on the fifth floor. Later, the court officers knocked on the door several times. Both saw a bottle of whisky in the room.
“Some of the jurors were holding plastic cups with liquid in them. (A court officer) told the jurors to break it up. Several jurors responded that they wanted a couple more drinks, that they were adults and could handle it.”
A court officer told them they should get some rest and that “people were relying on them to be sharp and at their best.”
The jurors said they would retire to their rooms, “but one of them shut the door to the room,” the Court of Appeal wrote.
“The court service officers waited for five minutes, then knocked again. After three or four requests, the jurors dispersed to their individual rooms around 2 a.m. Another three jurors went to another room together, with the last juror going to her own room around 4 a.m.”
A few hours earlier, three jurors asked to be taken outside for a cigarette.
Outside, one of the jurors expressed resentment that they were being treated like children. He said jurors just wanted to relax after “being stuck in that f---in’ stinking jury room for f---in’ hours without much relief or knowing what the f--- is going on,” the court wrote.
The juror was referring to long waits before getting final instructions from the judge.
The court officer told the juror it wasn’t a vacation and they had a job to do. The officer asked another juror if he had heard the judge explain his role as a juror, to which the juror said, “I don’t give a f--- what the judge says.” The juror immediately apologized.
The officer said those three jurors showed no signs of intoxication and no jurors seemed impaired the next day, a Sunday, when deliberations began. The jury delivered its verdict early Monday afternoon.
Justice Gladys Pardu of the Court of Appeal wrote: “Where there is no evidence that a juror’s ability to do their job has been impaired by alcohol, consumption of alcohol by a juror with or after dinner is no basis to set aside a verdict.”
She added: “I would expect that momentary expressions of frustration by jurors would be commonplace. There is no basis to conclude that there has been a miscarriage of justice, on that basis.”
Cyr, Zvolensky and Qahwash are serving automatic life sentences with no chance of parole until 2034. Cyr was married to Gehl, 28, but was cheating on her and hired Zvolensky and Qahwash to kill her, the Hamilton jury ruled. She was shot while walking to catch a bus on Ottawa Street in Kitchener.
The three men, who are all in their 30s, worked together as youth leaders at the Victoria Hills Community Centre in Kitchener at the time of the murder.
Cyr, Gehl’s high school sweetheart and husband of just eight months, had called to wake her on Feb. 2, 2009, so she wouldn’t be late leaving their semi-detached house in suburban Kitchener.
Gehl was walking to catch a bus on Ottawa Street South to get to her job at a toy store when three shots from a semi-automatic handgun rang out.
One of the bullets missed. One went clean through both of her breasts. The third shot, fired point-blank, hit Gehl’s left temple and likely killed her instantly. She was left lying on a path beside a snow bank.
There was no clear evidence at the trial on whether it was Zvolensky or Qahwash who pulled the trigger. But the verdicts showed jurors believed all three men played roles in a planned and deliberate killing, the definition of first-degree murder.
Another issue at the Appeal Court was whether a juror who had volunteered as an auxiliary police member was eligible for jury service. The juror’s role with the auxiliary service ended years before the trial.
The Juries Act says police officers are ineligible to serve as jurors but says nothing about auxiliary members, the Appeal Court noted. The Police Services Act says auxiliary members are not considered police officers.
“There is no air of reality to any reasonable apprehension of bias in relation (to the juror),” Pardu wrote.
Zvolensky maintained he and Qahwash should have been tried together, apart from Cyr.
“This is not a case where the evidence against one accused was significantly weaker compared to his co-accused,” Pardu wrote. “There was a risk of inconsistent verdicts with two or three separate trials. This was a case that called out for a joint trial.”