The Crown is asking jurors in the Jordan Manners murder case to discount the testimony of its own key witness - a teenage girl who told police she saw the 15-year-old's killing in a Toronto high school in 2007, but then recanted the statement in court.
In making the awkward request Monday at the close of the first-degree-murder trial of two young men known as J.W. and C.D., prosecutor Tom Lissaman effectively told jurors the girl was dishonest in court but truthful when she told detectives she saw Jordan dragged down a stairway, shot in the chest and robbed inside C.W. Jefferys Collegiate.
Rather than dismiss her as unreliable, Mr. Lissaman suggested, jurors should believe the girl's police statement, made just hours after Jordan's death, and disregard her attempts to take it back, which he said were motivated by fear.
"The fact that she told the truth that day, May 23, 2007, is borne out by all the other evidence," Mr. Lissaman said. "She told police what she saw because, simply put, it's the truth."
The prosecutor urged jurors not to allow the girl's subsequent fear "to come to this court and hold the truth hostage … Jordan Manners deserves much more than that."
Over more than six weeks of testimony, however, the Crown offered little evidence to show why Jordan, to the minds of his alleged killers, deserved to die, defence lawyers said in their closing statements. The lack of a clear motive, along with the girl's recanted statement and anomalies in the evidence, produced more than enough doubt to warrant acquittal of the two men, now 20, the lawyers said.
The prosecution's key witness told police she saw J.W. drag Jordan down a school stairwell "like a rag doll" and hold something to his chest just before he collapsed, gasping, to the floor. She said she then saw C.D. take a chain with a cross pendant from around his neck and slip a wallet and cellphone from his clothes. Another girl testified to having seen the chain removed.
However, authorities found a cross and chain on the boy's body, along with $90 in cash, a cellphone and an iPod. This, said C.D.'s lawyer Lydia Riva, negates the robbery motive. Jurors also heard that the two suspects and Jordan were friends, so much so that, on the day of the killing, J.W. emptied his pockets of belongings and gave them to Jordan for safekeeping while he played basketball.
"Members of the jury, did it make sense that two teenage boys would plan to rob a friend at school?" Ms. Riva asked. "Without a robbery, the Crown offers no motive."
Donald McLeod, lawyer for the alleged shooter J.W., reminded jurors of another mystery that even his opponent Mr. Lissaman acknowledged as "a condundrum" - that none of the witnesses in the stairwell heard a gunshot, but that a girl had heard a loud bang on the school's second floor, one level above the alleged shooting scene.
The girl testified that moments after the noise, she saw Jordan and two other boys, both in white T-shirts, walking from the direction of a washroom. Court has heard the accused were wearing dark shirts that day.
Mr. McLeod suggested Jordan was shot upstairs, likely in the washroom, and that his friends J.W. and C.D., noticing his rapidly deteriorating state, helped him down the stairs, where he collapsed.
"Where it happened, according to the Crown, is where no one hears anything," Mr. McLeod said. "[The stairwell]is where the Crown needed it to happen" in order to support the account its key witness gave to police, he said.
The lawyer told jurors it would be dangerous to try to "manoeuvre within the minutiae of her lies" to find bits of truth to support the prosecution.
Mr. Lissaman acknowledged his witness was both "contradictory" and "confrontational" in court, but added her "fear must have been very real; something anyone would feel" given what she saw that day.
He suggested she would not have come forward to police in the hours after the shooting and subjected herself to that fear had she not been sure she'd witnessed a murder.
Mr. Justice Ian Nordheimer is to instruct the jury Tuesday before they deliberate on a verdict.