It is not often in the criminal courts that the guilty weep for what they have actually done, that they are suffused with palpable shame and regret.
Usually, they cry for themselves and you can tell by the timing: The tears come at a moment of impact for them, not the victim, when they were caught, arrested, questioned by police or when they are being sentenced and remorse may be useful.
But Corporal Jeffrey Hall was convulsed with sobs yesterday at the very moment prosecutor Hank Goody was explaining to the jurors what the forensic pathologist would have testified, had the trial continued, about the nature of Paul Croutch's terrible injuries - the bleeding in his brain that killed him, the fractured ribs, the torn spleen.
Seconds later, Private Brian Deganis burst into tears.
Caught in between the two, somewhat as he had been throughout the entire process, Corporal Mountaz (Taz) Ibrahim sat still and quiet.
Mid-trial, the three reservists had just changed their pleas from not guilty to second-degree murder in the beating death of the 59-year-old homeless man to guilty - but now, in the case of Cpl. Hall and Pte. Deganis, guilty to manslaughter, and in Cpl. Ibrahim's case, guilty to being an accessory after the fact to the assault on Mr. Croutch.
All three also pleaded guilty to assault causing bodily harm in a subsequent attack on Valerie Valen, a courageous eyewitness who intervened in the assault on Mr. Croutch and was beaten for her trouble.
As Mr. Goody told the jurors, who had been hearing evidence on and off for exactly a month, there was "at least a reasonable doubt" that Cpl. Hall and Pte. Deganis were capable of forming the intent to kill or gravely injure Mr. Croutch, so inebriated were they that night - intoxication is a recognized defence, and relates to whether the accused had the ability to foresee the consequences of their actions.
And, Mr. Goody said there was "at least a reasonable doubt" that Cpl. Ibrahim was "a direct participant" in the fatal assault. "That's all there has to be," Mr. Goody said simply.
If it must have seemed a sudden turn of events to the jurors, it was not.
Discussions among the lawyers had been going on for several days and, in fact, both Cpl. Hall, who gave Toronto police a lengthy inculpatory statement the day of his arrest, and Pte. Deganis, who apparently remembers little of the night in question, were willing to plead guilty to manslaughter from the get-go.
The obstacle to an earlier plea bargain was Cpl. Ibrahim, who always maintained not only his innocence in the fatal beating, but also that he hadn't been there when the other two attacked the frail homeless man. He told police that he encountered the other two only afterward, when they were involved with Ms. Valen.
What changed was that where, in her original statement, Ms. Valen told police she had seen all three beating and kicking Mr. Croutch, at trial, she was less confident about Cpl. Ibrahim's participation, and admitted to inconsistencies that rendered it more likely she was mixing up the two who had attacked Mr. Croutch with the three who assaulted her.
On the nuts and bolts, Ms. Valen was a formidable and compelling witness, but on the fringes of her evidence - exactly how well she could see on that rain-swept morning and who was doing what to whom - were the normal human frailties that often make eyewitness testimony suspect.
Coupled with the fact that Cpl. Hall said in his police statement that it was he and Pte. Deganis who committed the fatal beating - of Cpl. Ibrahim, he said: "He didn't do anything" - it was enough to tip the delicate balance such that Mr. Goody, a principled veteran prosecutor, could not honestly appear before the jurors and ask them to convict the three, but particularly Cpl. Ibrahim, of second-degree murder, a crime where the automatic sentence is life in prison.
Manslaughter, by contrast, carries a maximum sentence of life and no minimum term.
The three young men were members of the Queen's Own Rifles of Canada, a venerable reserve regiment based at Moss Park Armoury in a downtown Toronto park of the same name.
The jurors heard all were considered fine young men and hard-working soldiers, with Cpl. Hall, who had signed up that very day to go to Afghanistan, and Pte. Deganis deemed particular bright lights.
On the evening of Aug. 30, 2005, members of the regiment were saying goodbye to a group of German paratroopers with whom they had just finished training in Petawawa. A few Queen's Own soldiers were at an informal farewell dinner, with others invited to stop by afterward for drinks.
By early the next morning, Cpl. Hall and Pte. Deganis were drunk and aggressive - so drunk that, in an ironic touch, an officer asked Cpl. Ibrahim, who had had only three drinks, to get them into a taxi and see them safely back to the armoury.
At one point just outside the building's front doors, Pte. Deganis had to be restrained - and it was Cpl. Hall who did it - from running out to Queen Street to attack an unknown person in a bus shelter; a senior officer with the regiment heard him shouting that he "hated bums and homeless people and wanted to take them on." At another, Cpl. Hall was belligerently arguing at the back of the armoury with a drunk warrant officer, and this time it was Pte. Deganis who stepped into the peacemaker role.
Told to go to sleep, or go home, the two soldiers finally headed into the park, apparently to get into the rear parking lot where Pte. Deganis's truck was parked.
Mr. Croutch was sleeping or resting on a bench between the tennis courts and the baseball diamond, wrapped in garbage bags against the driving rain. The jurors have never heard how he first came to the attention of the young soldiers, although John Rosen, who represents Cpl. Hall, and Boris Bytensky, who represents Cpl. Ibrahim, believe that Mr. Croutch, who had $310 in his wallet, may have feared he was about to be robbed and said something.
Ill with severe high blood pressure and emphysema, his legs so swollen he had difficulty walking and with a deteriorating mental state and an increased level of paranoia noticed by some of those in the social services who had tried to help him, Mr. Croutch was no match for two fit, military-trained 20-somethings.
The two set upon him with vicious drunken ferocity that Cpl. Hall told homicide detectives, just two days later, was "just disgusting."
Ms. Valen, walking through the park looking for a prostitute friend, was drawn to the fight by the sounds of them shouting about "addicts, hookers, fucking bums." When she stopped to watch, she said she saw them kicking the defenceless man "like a football," and when she told them to stop, they turned their attention on her, not realizing she was a woman - and when she cried out that she was, calling her a "dyke." At one point, she said, Mr. Deganis "thrust his military dog tags in her face and screamed, " 'This gives us the right to kill all the homeless bums, crackheads, whores' - and that I need to tell all my friends."
At a memorial service for Mr. Croutch on Sept. 13 that year, James Bartleman, then the Ontario lieutenant-governor - the two had met when Mr. Bartleman was on a Salvation Army breakfast run - remembered his "innate sense of dignity" and said, "He was the innocent among the guilty, the lamb among the wolves of our city."
Soldiers, even part-time ones like reservists, are not supposed to be wolves. Indeed, a modern military parable popular in the Canadian army - it comes from a former U.S. Army Ranger and psychology professor named Dave Grossman - divides the world into sheep and wolves, with the soldier cast as the protective sheepdog.
With their tears and their shame yesterday, Jeff Hall and Brian Deganis showed that they recognize that too, how gravely they breached the dearest tenets, and paid the only tribute they could to Mr. Croutch.
They will be sentenced on April 30.
CORRECTION
Corporal Jeffrey Hall and Private Brian Deganis pleaded guilty to manslaughter on Thursday in the death of Paul Croutch, and Corporal Mountaz Ibrahim pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact to assault. Incorrect information appeared in a caption to a courtroom sketch in yesterday's newspaper.