Jury delivers quick conviction in restaurant slaying

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This article was published 27/06/2016 (2859 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

DNA evidence proved to be the proverbial smoking gun as jurors needed only a few hours to find a Winnipeg man guilty a execution-style killing inside a Salisbury House restaurant.

Devin Hall, 30, was convicted Tuesday of first-degree murder in the September 2012 shooting death of 23-year-old Jeffrey Lau. He was also found guilty of causing bodily harm to one of Lau’s friends who was hit by gunfire while sitting at the same table.

Hall showed no visible reaction to the verdict and was immediately given a life sentence with no chance of parole for at least 25 years.

“What we saw on the (surveillance) video, and what we heard described afterwards, is nothing short of a cold-blooded execution,” said Queen’s Bench Justice Chris Martin.

Although jurors weren’t provided any motive for the attack, it was believed to be linked to the drug trade. Lau was a known cocaine dealer, and Hall was also entrenched in selling narcotics. That led Martin to bemoan the sorry state of drug addiction and distribution in the city.

“It is, without question, an exceptionally dangerous activity. There’s usually, usually, only two outcomes in these circumstances. Either you go to jail, or you’re dead,” said Martin.

Jurors heard nearly three full weeks of evidence before Crown and defence lawyers made closing arguments last Thursday. Deliberations began Tuesday morning, and the verdict was reached by 3 p.m.

Witnesses were unable to identify the gunman, who had a shirt pulled over his face. He also wore gloves, which meant no fingerprints were left behind. But investigators were able to develop DNA profiles from a shirt and gloves officers found discarded near the Pembina Highway eatery.

Seven samples produced a compelling link to Hall. Experts say the chance of another person being the primary source of the DNA found on the items ranged from one in 1.5 trillion to one in 4.2 quadrillion.

Another key piece of evidence was the description by one of Lau’s friends of the gunman fleeing in a waiting Lincoln vehicle. Police checked local car rental businesses and found Hall had signed out a Lincoln weeks earlier, along with another man.

That witness, Justin Latinecz, was shot and killed one year after Lau’s slaying in an as yet unsolved attack. His testimony came from a videotaped police interview hours after Lau died.

“Mr. Latinecz himself spoke volumes from the grave,” Martin said Tuesday.

Defence lawyer Martin Glazer put his own expert on the stand last week to say the DNA evidence doesn’t prove Hall fired the gun. That’s because investigators found what’s known as a mixed profile on the items, with DNA traces from at least three people. The primary source was Hall, but Glazer’s expert told jurors that doesn’t exclude the possibility that the unidentified DNA on the items belongs to the killer.

Jurors were given several possible explanations as to how Hall’s DNA could have been on the items even if he had nothing to do with the shooting: transferring his DNA through contact with the killer; innocently touching the items at some point; or even having the gloves and shirt come into contact with other items or locations where his DNA had been left behind.

“There’s nothing connecting Mr. Hall to the gloves and shirt at the time of the shooting,” Glazer argued. “This case is a whodunit. It has no solid foundation. It sinks in its own quicksand. Guessing is not evidence. All the Crown has is a guess.”

Glazer warned jurors about the dangers of a wrongful conviction and said this case doesn’t come close to meeting the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt threshold required by law. He said Hall has “become the victim of assumption and speculation.”

“When the prosecution closed its case, did any of you ask yourselves, ‘Is that it? Does the Crown have anything more?’ Talk about potential for a wrongful conviction,” he said.

Jurors clearly saw it differently in quickly reaching their guilty verdict.

www.mikeoncrime.com

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