Shooting evidence will shock: Lawyer
Toronto cop on trial in death of teenager
Outside on the steps of the Old City Hall courts, Peter Brauti, the lawyer for Toronto police Const. James Forcillo, reminded the public “there is another side to this story” and pleaded for people “to keep an open mind.”
But inside, where in a musty room before Ontario Court Judge Richard LeDressay the preliminary hearing for Forcillo had begun, it was clear that the public narrative about what happened on a downtown streetcar one hot July evening last year is already fixed, if not carved in stone.
Forcillo, now 31, is charged with seconddegree murder in the July 27 shooting of 18-year-old Sammy Yatim, who was shot eight times on the Dundas streetcar.
The shooting followed a brief standoff with police and occurred, news reports said at the time, after Yatim allegedly had been both exposing himself and brandishing a knife on the streetcar.
A preliminary inquiry is held to determine if there is any evidence upon which a reasonable jury, properly instructed, could convict; it isn’t a tough standard to meet. A happy byproduct for the defence lawyer is that the hearing offers a preview of the strength of the Crown’s case.
But the catch for press and public is that, usually, there’s a publication ban upon the evidence heard at a preliminary, and that is the case here.
The purpose of the ban is to protect the accused person’s fair-trial rights, though generally speaking in the modern Canadian system it takes so long from preliminary hearing to the start of trial that most potential jurors would have long forgotten any details he or she would have heard in the absence of such a ban.
So, the evidence heard can’t be published until either Forcillo is discharged or his trial in Superior Court has ended.
That said, and without touching upon the evidence itself, it’s undeniable that the narrative written in the public imagination in the immediate aftermath of Yatim’s death appears to have grown deep roots during the nine months since.
Old as it was in a way, the story unfolded in a completely modern fashion: horrified citizens near the shooting scene shot footage on cellphones, posted it on the web, where predictably it went viral and fed a groundswell of outrage, protest and public conversations about alleged police use of force, particularly in dealing with the mentally ill, though there was barely a suggestion and never confirmation that Yatim fit that bill.
But in the result, the narrative that took hold was that Forcillo was alleged to have used lethal force too soon, or too much of it (which defies common sense), or had somehow messed up.
So it was not surprising that one of the witnesses who testified Tuesday referred to the teenager simply by his first name, as though he had been friend not stranger, or that another acknowledged that nothing would ever change her opinion, regardless of the mountain of critical information she didn’t have when first she formed it.
Watching all this was Yatim’s mother, Sahar Bahadi, accompanied at times by a woman from the Ontario victim/witness office. At one point, Bahadi began weeping and briefly disappeared from view, but returned a short time later, as quietly as she left.
Also present was Forcillo’s wife, Irina, and a handful of young men and women who appeared to be off-duty colleagues on the job. Mike McCormack, the president of the police association, walked in with Forcillo.
The small courtroom was crowded but, except for one young man wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned on the back with a Justice For Sammy slogan, there was no sign either of the protesters who last summer marched on downtown streets or of the wall of the police brotherhood sometimes in evidence at high-profile police trials.
The loss of a son, the threat of a loss of liberty and a career, the gravity of the proceeding and all that is at stake — these hard realities have sunk in with the key players.
“And without going into the evidence, I can tell you that some of the conduct that took place on that streetcar on that evening in relation to Mr. Yatim is going to shock people,” Brauti said on the courthouse steps.
“And I have the feeling it’s going to change a lot of people’s minds. I just ask members of the public to keep an open mind, and before you start picking up a sign to protest and start taking a position, you should be very careful and think about the fact that you haven’t heard all the evidence in this case, and some of the evidence is pretty frightening.”
It is frightening; Brauti is right. But change a lot of people’s minds?
That may be an overly rosy view.
The hearing continues.