- Where there is a political agenda to convict someone, anyone, of the crime.
- Where not a single witness actually saw the crime occur, much less saw you do it.
- Where the police choose to ignore a far more likely suspect for reasons of their own.
- Where the media is free to vilify you as the “panhandler killer” for more than three years, while you and your loved ones are strictly forbidden by the court from speaking about the case in public.
- Where the police try to deliberately frame you on an unrelated charge for the purpose of having your bail revoked.
- Where an uncertain criminal “justice” system deals in three versions of the charge against you, such that if you didn’t do the first, maybe you did the second, and if you did neither you are still somehow guilty for being there.
- Where the authorities are allowed to “lose” the video evidence that could have proven your innocence, without the slightest consequence to their case.
- Where DNA tests of critical evidence are not performed, while the defendant’s clothing is ordered to be tested again and again until a trivial and readily explainable amount of the victim’s DNA is found.
- Where any witness they produce is held against you, regardless of what they actually say, by cherry picking which pieces of each one’s testimony to accept or reject.
- Where foreign citizens who are vital defense witnesses are prevented by law from entering the country to testify at your trial.
- Where the judge plays “detective”, assuming facts not in evidence, always against your interests, and the appeal decision both rubber stamps this practice and adds assumptions of its own.
- Where the resulting sentence offers the chance of parole after 12 long years, but only if you give up your right to maintain your innocence, or else you can live out your entire life in prison, starting from age 24.
- Where in the aftermath of your wrongful conviction, the nation’s top television news program wants to interview you in prison, but the authorities refuse to allow it.
What are they hiding?
Every one of these points is a factor in the wrongful conviction of Nicole “Nyki” Kish. Together they make up one of the most egregious injustices I have ever encountered. If they can convict Nyki in this way, they can literally convict anyone of any crime at any time. That could be you, a friend or a loved one. Please read on for a detailed explanation of each of the points above.
Case Overview:
By Leon Myerson
On the night of August 8th, 2007 Nicole “Nyki”
Kish was celebrating her 21st birthday with her friends. What should have been the first day of her
adult life would soon become the start of a decade long nightmare of personal
liberty stolen by a criminal justice system either incompetent, corrupt or
both.
Shortly before midnight, Internet entrepreneurs Ross Hammond
and his associate George Dranichek were drawing funds from an ATM machine when
they were approached by a young woman asking for money. One of the men suggested that she earn it by
performing a sex act, thus starting an angry verbal argument that soon turned
into a physical brawl. The incident
escalated as it moved down the street, ultimately engulfing both sides of a
stopped street car. At some point
Hammond received a number of knife wounds, one of which proved fatal two days
later.
After 3 ½ years under house arrest, Nyki was convicted of
second degree murder in a bench trial where the verdict features shocking gaps
of logic and evidence and in which there are numerous instances of actually editing
and cherry-picking testimony to suit the goal of conviction. A subsequent appeals court confirmed these
practices, and added still more errors of its own.
Where there is a
political agenda to convict someone, anyone, of the crime.
For many years, Toronto had chafed under a social problem dubbed
“aggressive panhandling” which was giving the city a reputation of having
unsafe streets. This long standing issue
served to attract undue media attention to the fatal stabbing of Ross Hammond
as soon as word got out that the wielder of the knife may have been a
panhandler. An opportunity occurred for
law enforcement to make an example of a panhandler, while the media cheered
them on.
Is Nicole Kish therefore the victim of a political agenda as
well as a miscarriage of justice?
I believe this to be the case, and I reach that conclusion from the trial
verdict itself, in which Justice Nordheimer explicitly concludes that Nyki was
the panhandler who started the entire incident.
From the verdict: “He went to the ATM and, whether before or
after using the machine, he and Mr. Hammond were approached by a female who
asked for money. I am satisfied that the female who approached them was Nicole
Kish. In that regard, I have concluded that Mr. Dranichak is mistaken in his
identification of Ms. Watts as the person who approached him.”
Justice Nordheimer states that is he rejecting the evidence of
the only witness to specifically offer an identification of the panhandler, George
Dranichak, as not being Nicole Kish. He does this in spite of Dranichak having
been the individual who was actually asked for money. He does not stop at rejecting testimony, he
is actually correcting it to be what will support his reasoning.
More telling still, he is also contradicting the Crown’s own
narrative of the events in question. From
the Crown’s opening remarks at trial:
“They stop at an outdoor green machine, TD green machine to get
some funds. And there, they are approached by a woman on a bike, who wants some
money. They refuse, and a shouting match ensues, and as they head west,
additional quote “street people”, join up with them, and one of which
is Ms. Kish, the accused before the court, Nicole Kish.”
One additional point stands out above all others. There is nothing, neither in law nor logic,
regarding the charges brought against Nyki that in any way depends upon her
having been the panhandler. So if this conclusion, which contradicts the
Crown’s assertions and the testimony of the only witness, is completely
gratuitous as far as the law is concerned, why is it there?
To borrow Justice Nordheimer’s most infamous phrase, I find an
“irresistible inference” that we are seeing the Agenda at work, not just to
prosecute Hammond’s killer, but to make an example of a panhandling street kid.
Therefore Nyki must be the panhandler, regardless of the facts, as much as she
must be the killer, again regardless of the facts.
Where not a single
witness actually saw the crime occur, much less saw you do it.
From the
verdict: “I tum then to the issue of the identity of the female involved in the
two fights. Before reviewing the evidence on that issue, I want to say that I
am aware that, with one exception, none of the witnesses, on whose evidence I
rely, positively identified Ms. Kish, or indeed Ms. Watts, from any
photographic line-ups that they were shown by the police. Given the
circumstances of these events, I am not surprised by that fact. These events
took place in a matter of minutes -not over days as they took to be recounted
at this trial. They were fast moving and chaotic -as more than one witness
described them
He notes that the events were fast and chaotic, and is not
surprised by that lack of eyewitness identification. But is that not an admission of uncertainty,
indeed of reasonable doubt? See how he
deals with only witness to make a photo identification.
“The one exception is Ms. DeSilvia who did pick out a
photograph of Ms. Watts as looking like the female who had been stabbed. She
was obviously in error in that regard as we know that Ms. Kish was the only
female who was stabbed. At the same time, Ms. DeSilvia also picked out a
photograph of Ms. Kish as someone who looked familiar as being involved in the
events. The actual photo line-up process was not shown in evidence so I do not
know the certainty with which Ms. DeSilvia made her selections but I am satisfied
that Ms. DeSilvia simply interchanged the two females in the process.”
So the one witness who did make a definite identification
got it wrong. Here the judge is also missing
the fact that he has just confirmed a major point of the defense, that
witnesses can and do confuse Kish and Watts.
Should a judge say that a witness simply “interchanged” the defendant with
someone else, and then use that witness’s testimony anyway? If witness testimony can be thus “corrected” by
the judge, who could ever prove their innocence?
Where the police
choose to ignore a far more likely suspect for reasons of their own.
From the video conference testimony of Faith Watts at the prelim,
being questioned by Attorney John Scarfe:
“Q.
Are you aware as to whether or not Hal (Amero)
carried a weapon, at any time?
A.
I know that he was a very violent person.
Q. M’hmm.
A. And before we were actually showed
up in Toronto, people had warned us about him to not hang out with us.
Q. M’hmm.
A. And then, we ended up meeting him.
And I don’t know for a fact if he had any –I mean know from what I heard,
later on, being in jaiI with people that
got arrested later, that had seen what had actually happened, and were not
completely intoxicated, what they had told me was that he had a knife, that it
was a purple knife.
Q. Okay.
A. And that it was in the sewer somewhere.
Q. All right.
A.
But I did not see it, myself.”
Hal wasn’t brought in for an interview
until more than a year had passed. By
this time the police were completely committed to the prosecution of Nyki. Indeed, that was true from the day she was
charged with murder, which has also the day of Hammond’s funeral and therefore
the peak of the media pressure on the police to arrest someone, anyone, for the
crime.
Once the police have made an arrest,
they are no longer investigating to discover the truth, they are looking for
confirmation to aid the prosecution. The
media should NEVER rush them.
The police did finally check the sewer,
but did not find a knife. However, this
was also months later, during which time city maintenance crews had cleaned out
the sewer.
As a follow
up to the above, again from Justice Nordheimer’s verdict:
[131] … Still further is the fact that the
only other knife, that we know was present at any time in the course of these
events, belonged to Douglas Fresh.”
The vital
core of Justice Nordheimer’s verdict depends utterly on their having been only
one knife involved in the fight, with Fresh’s having remained in his
pocket. Yet all of the above indicates
at least one other knife not only present, but in the hands of someone very
much involved. The judge has apparently mistaken the “fact” that we know of
only one other knife as proof of the “fact” that there was no other knife. There is a very old adage being ignored,
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Did Amero
stab Ross Hammond? I do not know. Nor can I know whether he had a knife and
subsequently put it down a sewer. I do
know that if the above information was available to the police they had no
business charging Nyki with the crime before at least questioning this man. Note that Watts and the other people she is
referring to were ALL in police custody except for Amero.
Was this
miscarriage of justice as simple and banal an evil as the police having Nyki in
custody, whereas Amero was nowhere to be found?
Was the pressure the police felt to charge someone by the day of
Hammond’s funeral enough for them to destroy the life of an innocent young
woman? Alas, all too many of the
wrongful convictions to have been reversed in recent years have shown exactly
such a pattern of official misconduct.
Where the media is
free to vilify you as the “panhandler killer” for more than three years, while
you and your loved ones are strictly forbidden by the court from speaking about
the case in public.
From the start the media went into one of its typical
feeding frenzies over this case, immediately grabbing and hyping the
“panhandler” element to the extent of branding Nyki the “Pandhandler Killer”
long before her trial had even begun.
They were free to publicize this image as much as they pleased, while Nyki,
as well as her friends and family, were barred by court order from making any
public comments about the case. It was
this negative and highly prejudicial disinformation campaign that led to the fateful
decision to ask for a bench trial in the hopes that a judge would be more fair
and objective than a jury tainted with such blatant propaganda. It turns out to have been mistake. The warning signs were there in the fact that
the Crown initially opposed the bench trial, but only until Justice Nordheimer,
the judge in charge of assigning cases, took the unusual step of asking both
sides to be the trial judge himself.
This was highly unusual given that he had been the judge at the bail
hearing. He had seemed reasonable and
fair at that hearing, causing Nyki’s side to accept, but more ominously it
caused the Crown to drop its objections.
Where the police try
to deliberately frame you on an unrelated charge for the purpose of having your
bail revoked.
There was a failed attempt by the police to literally
“frame” Nyki on an unrelated assault charge from an incident several weeks
prior to Hammond’s death. The only
probable motive is that under the terms of her bail, Nyki was living under house
arrest at her grandmother’s home. It is
far more difficult to aid in one’s own defense while in custody. In jail, the authorities have more control
over the environment, they can record conversations, visitors and gather
information in multiple ways.
From Justice Vallencourt’s ruling:
“It strikes me as strange that the Officer-in-Charge here
found it appropriate to have the accused surrender with Counsel at a date to be
arranged, expressing no concern, as to risk of flight.”
“However, senior officers who are involved with a murder
charge, in which this accused has been granted bail, decided that the arrest
had to be made immediately. I detect an
undercurrent of unhappiness, perhaps, with a Superior Court Judge’s
determination on an original bail for the murder count.”
In addition to the weakness of the identification, there are
Nyki’s alibis. First, there was a family
gathering at her grandmother’s home on the day the assault was originally
supposed to have taken place, which provided plenty of witnesses as to her
whereabouts. Incredibly, the police then
tried to overcome this problem by simply changing the date on which the assault
was to have taken place. This time Nyki
had signed an electronic receipt at her grandmother’s home for cable TV service
at the critical date and time. Having
had their clumsy attempts fail twice, the police chose to give up. The question remains, after tactics like
this, how can anything the authorities say about this case be trusted?
Where an uncertain criminal
“justice” system deals in three versions of the charge against you, such that
if you didn’t do the first, maybe you did the second, and if you did neither
you are still somehow guilty.
The three versions of the charge reflect different versions
of events:
- That Nyki stabbed Ross Hammond causing his
death.
- That she carried the knife across the street to
give to someone who then stabbed Hammond.
- That she is guilty simply by being an “aider” in
some unspecified way.
The last two rely on the “felony murder” doctrine by which
anyone involved in a crime can be considered guilty of murder if someone is
killed. But there are two glaring
problems here. By bringing up all three versions
in this trial the Crown blatantly admits that it is not certain as to what
happened that night. Instead, they are
inviting the judge to sort it out at trial.
A judge is not supposed to do the Crown’s work for it, although this one
unfortunately did.
If the supposed “proof” that Nyki stabbed Hammond falls
through, so does the argument that she carried the knife across the
street. Unless we are to believe that Watts
gave it her, she gave it to someone else, who stabbed Hammond, only to have
Hammond seize it and then stab her. It
must be noted that this is a knife, not a basketball. Also that no one saw this supposed transfer
of the knife from Watts to Nyki.
There are uncountable ways to be “involved” in a street brawl
without being culpable. One might be a
random spectator, or perhaps someone actively trying to stop the brawl or to
pull a friend away from it. Some
witnesses report Nyki as the only person yelling for someone to call the
police. Most importantly, if they can
convict you as an “aider” without having to specify exactly what they think you
did, who is safe?
The Crown has always known that this was a possibility. By mentioning a version of events in which
Nyki neither stabbed Hammond nor carried the knife, they also leave open the
only other possibility, that Hammond transported the knife himself.
Where the authorities
are allowed to “lose” the video evidence that could have proven your innocence,
without the slightest consequence to their case.
One of the most troubling aspects of this case is that TWO
surveillance videos that might have exonerated Nyki where lost. A pasta shop situated in the middle of the
incident had a pair of digital cameras pointed in opposite directions above the
entrance. A few days later a police
technician retrieved two hour long recordings from each camera from the
system’s computer. He thus violated
protocol by not imaging the entire hard drive.
Incredibly, he failed to retrieve the most important video by allegedly
making the mistake of copying the right time but for the day he was there,
rather than the day of the crime.
But ONLY for that one video, the other three were done
correctly. This went “unnoticed” until
it was too late to copy the right segment because the system records over the
space after eleven days. The system
automatically names the files retrieved with the date and time of the
recording, making it hard not to wonder if this was really an “accident”. The
filename for the correct date is 20070809_000000.WMV. All three of the correct files start with
20070809. The most important one, the
one could have recorded the fight itself, is called 20070814_000000.WMV.
A second video tape from the neighboring store was collected
only to be somehow “lost”, supposedly without ever being viewed.
When a motion to suspend the proceedings against Nyki was
made, Justice Nordheimer acknowledged the violation of evidence collection
protocol, and that it had indeed violated Nyki’s rights. However, he concluded that the video would
not likely have shown the fight and would have been of insufficient importance
to the defense. Without viewing the
recordings, how could he know? Worse
still, he asserts that the critical fight did not happen in the area covered by
the camera, even though Melissa Gallately, the star witness the judge thinks
actually witnessed the stabbing, does place whatever she saw in the area he
chooses to ignore.
Where DNA tests of
critical evidence goes undone, while the defendant’s clothing is ordered to be
tested again and again until a trivial and readily explainable amount of the
victim’s DNA is found.
Somehow Ross Hammond’s shirt was never tested for DNA, even
though experts on DNA evidence confirm that a knife fight virtually guarantees
the mutual transfer of DNA between the recipients.
More to the point, the ONLY trace of Hammond’s DNA on Nyki’s
clothing was found only on the tip of her left shoe. This is readily explainable by her having
stepped in it, since Hammond’s blood was found in multiple locations on the
street. What is simply not explainable
by the Crown is the failure to find it anywhere else on Nyki’s clothes. However, Hammond’s DNA was found on Watts’
clothing in multiple locations.
There is one other critical point concerning this
matter. It wasn’t until the fifth round
of testing, almost three years after the stabbing, that Hammond’s DNA was found
on the tip of Nyki’s shoe. This was
fifteen months after the shoe had been examined for the first time during the
fourth round of testing. It is as if the
lab was being ordered to go back again and again looking for the evidence the
police had presumed was there, but now couldn’t find.
Where any witness
they produce is held against you, regardless of what they actually say, by
cherry picking which pieces of each one’s testimony to accept or reject.
Here is Mr. Thompson
for the Crown asking Melissa Gallately about her prior sworn testimony at the
preliminary hearing that the man who she saw being beaten had driven himself
away in a car, which would preclude him being Hammond.
Thompson: Okay. Is that your evidence today? Or are you
— you’ve given us a little bit of a different version. Do you have a
recollection of it or are you changing your evidence or are you mistaken or can
you give us an explanation?
Gallately: Either —
I don’t remember, to be honest. I remember that he got to the dark vehicle, but
to be honest the more I’m thinking about it I was focused on the girl still
screaming on — about being bloody and her hand, so I think as I thought he was
going to the dark vehicle, I assumed he got in and left, but my attention was
directed towards the fight on the sidewalk. Because he went near the vehicle
and he was gone.
Thompson: Okay. Fair
enough. …..
If you accept this
explanation, then Gallately seems to have a tendency towards conflating memory
with assumptions thus making her an unreliable witness. However, I question whether this testimony
really was an error on her part.
If you saw someone
approaching a door, and after glancing away when you look back they are gone,
you might very well have the impression that they’ve gone through the
door. But note that the door is still
there.
Where a car is
concerned, it wouldn’t make sense to assume that the person you saw and who is
now gone has driven away unless you also observe an empty parking space left
behind. I don’t think anyone asked her
about that point. So either she did
observe that and is remembering something real that should not be repudiated in
her trial testimony or her imagination can defy logic itself. Either way, she should not be relied upon to
identify Hammond as being beaten by Nyki.
In her account, the
man being beaten was lying on his back with a woman kneeling beside him and
making “flailing” motions over him while screaming about her hand being
wounded. Nyki’s stab wound was to her
forearm, nearer her elbow than her wrist.
With such a wound, would you be yelling about your “hand”, or your
“arm”. More to the point, if this were
Nyki kneeling by Hammond and waving her wounded arm over his prone body, it
would be physically impossible not to have gotten her blood on him. Yet NONE of Nyki’s DNA was ever found on
Hammond’s body or his clothes despite repeated tests.
Strangely enough,
his shirt was never tested during the three and half years before trial. At
least, that’s what we’re told. It is an
inconvenient fact Hammond’s DNA was found all over Watts’ clothing, yet she
supposedly had far less contact with him.
One final point
seems never to have been considered in the judge’s verdict. Dranichak testified that at one point he was
lying flat on the ground being beaten.
He then managed to break away and left the scene in a taxi. While not an exact match for Gallately’s testimony,
it is far closer.
THE COURT: I have to be guided by the expert evidence
that I have as opposed to going off on my own to come up with theories. As I
understand Dr. Pollanen’s evidence, he said that a serrated knife might leave
serrated edges on — when it
makes a cut and it might not, depending on a number of factors, including how
the knife goes into the substance that is being cut.
I truly have to ask,
how could we possibly know, just because no one saw two knives at the same
time, that they all saw the same knife?
Should we really expect a witness to know that someone else didn’t see
the same thing as they had seen? For
that matter, who other than Stopford and Paget ever claimed to see a knife at
all until after Hammond was stabbed, at which point most attention was on him,
some on Nyki and very little on anyone else.
Please note how poorly their drawings agree and judge for yourself
whether a case can be made that right there and then two different knives were
seen.
This issue is very
much at the heart of the verdict. In
saying that no one ever saw another knife, Justice Nordheimer has already
accepted Stopford and Paget as having seen Nyki with the only knife on the
south side of the streetcar. Reading
this section, I think he’s already found her guilty. But it is another instance of all too
familiar backwards reasoning. If
Stopford and Paget saw someone other than Nyki (or Watts) then they did indeed
see another knife. But that can’t be
true, since there’s only one knife and Nyki must have carried it in order to be
guilty.
Imagine telling the police that you saw a tall, thin,
Caucasian male running from the liquor store with a gun in his hand. But when called to testify by the Crown, you
discover that the defendant is black. In
any sane proceeding you should be a defense witness. Yet you testify for the Crown and while they
like tall, thin, male, running, store and gun they simply disregard your
testimony that the man you saw was white.
Since the Crown called you, you count against the defendant, regardless
of what you actually say.
This hypothetical example may seem too fantastic to be taken
seriously, yet throughout Nyki’s trial there was an incredible pattern of
cherry picking pieces of the witnesses’ testimony in exactly this manner. This practice effectively alters the
testimony, turning it into whatever the Crown finds convenient, while
suppressing anything that is not.
Melissa Gallately, touted as the Crown’s star witness,
testified that the man she saw being beaten while on the ground broke free and
drove himself away in a car. Yet all
sides agree that the wounded victim, Ross Hammond, was dragged up the street by
a cab he’d tried to enter and collapsed on the church steps, where the
ambulance crew later found him. Should
the judge disregard this part of the witness’ testimony while accepting
whatever else fits the Crown’s scenario?
Or should we take Gallately at her word, and acknowledge that whoever it
was that she saw being beaten that night, he wasn’t Hammond?
The Crown called Molly Stopford to identify Nyki as the
woman with the murder weapon on the south side of the street. Not only could Stopford not positively
identify Nyki as the woman she saw with a knife, she drew a picture of a knife
with a smooth, non-serrated edge. Later
she specifically testified that the knife she saw was not serrated, yet the
Crown shows us as the alleged murder weapon a knife with a half-serrated
edge. Isn’t the unadulterated meaning of
Stopford’s testimony that the knife she saw was not the murder weapon, that the
woman wielding it was therefore not Nyki and that the Crown’s theory of only
one knife being involved in the fight is simply wrong?
‘Still further is the fact that the only other
knife that we know was present in the
course
of these events, belonged to Douglas Fresh. Not only was Mr Fresh still
in
possession of that knife when he was arrested, it was tested for blood and none
was found.”
In spite of the inconsistency regarding the prominent
serrations, both Justice Nordheimer, and later Justice MacFarland of the
appeals court praise the detail of Stopford’s drawing. Apparently detail counts more than accuracy.
Jonathan Paget drew
a knife that looked nothing like Stopford’s drawing. He acknowledged that he could not name a
single characteristic to support his testimony, only his belief in the adage
that the person who brings a knife to a fight is the one most likely to be
injured by it. On this basis alone he
claims that the knife he saw on the south side of the street car is the same
knife he later saw in Hammond’s hand all the way on the other side of the
street. Again, the judgment against Nyki
keeps what is convenient and discards the rest.
Where foreign
citizens who are vital defense witnesses are prevented by law from entering the
country to testify at your trial.
Nyki was with three American friends during the incident in
which Ross Hammond was killed. All three
were deported to the US under an order that forbade their return for a period
of five years. Despite the willingness
of all three to attend the trial, and even to be held in custody for the length
of their stay in Canada, the Crown refused to help the defense make their
appearance possible.
One of the Americans, Faith Watts, did testify at the
Preliminary Hearing via video link. Her
testimony was shockingly misused and Nyki’s attorney could not have her amplify
or defend the exculpatory aspects of her testimony at trial.
Watts testified that the Crown’s alleged murder weapon was
HER knife, and that Hammond grabbed it from her hand while they were both still
on the south side of the street. Justice
Nordheimer accepts her statement that it was her knife, but simply decides not
believe the rest of her testimony because she was drunk and high on drugs. His version of events requires Nyki to have
been the one who carried the knife across the street, so that she would have it
in her possession either to stab Hammond herself or to give it to someone else
to stab him. Since the second part of
Watts’ testimony flat out contradicts the outcome the judge wants, he simply
drops it while keeping the part he needs.
Again, who is safe if a judge can do this?
Where the judge plays
“detective”, assuming facts not in evidence, always against your interests, and
the appeal decision both rubber stamps this practice and adds assumptions of
its own.
In his verdict Justice Nordheimer says, “in order to try and determine who
caused the death of Ross Hammond, I must reach my conclusions based on the
evidence of close to twenty different witnesses to the events that led to his
death.” It is NOT the task of a
judge to “determine” who committed a murder.
It is his job only to decide whether the Crown has proven that the
authorities have solved the murder beyond a reasonable doubt. An impartial judge does not try to help the
Crown by filling in missing pieces of its case.
Even if he forms an opinion about something, if the Crown does not argue
that point, it shouldn’t be used as part of the verdict. It must also be pointed out that if the judge
undertakes to “prove” who did the crime, the defense is being pressured to
“prove” who else might have done it. Yet
as Justice Nordheimer also states, “I fully understand and appreciate that there is no onus whatsoever on Ms.
Kish to prove anything in this case.”
Justice Nordheimer accepts the knife presented by the Crown
as the being the one used to fatally stab Hammond. However, the CFS expert witness, Dr.
Pollanen, refused to definitively confirm or deny whether this was true. The limits of forensic simply do not permit
such a conclusion.
Here the Judge makes his most egregious error. Despite Dr. Pollanen’s refusal to identify
the knife, and despite his ruling that he must not theorize on his own, Justice
Nordheimer draws his own conclusion that the presence of both Hammond’s and
Nyki’s blood at the hinge of the knife somehow creates an “irresistible
inference” that the same knife wounded both of them. This is the absolute central point of his
verdict, such that everything else can be seen as having been reasoned
backwards from this one point.
The judge is in error, not only because Hammond’s hands were
bleeding, but because there is a far more plausible explanation. Ross Hammond lost the tip of his thumb during
the fight. If he did take the knife from
Watts and closed it he could easily have done that to his thumb himself. The injury to his thumb is an EXACT match for
the wound often seen in emergency rooms when people close this type of knife,
with a liner lock mechanism, but fail to move their thumb out of the way. In an adrenaline fuel drunken rage, Hammond
might well have not even noticed that he’d done this to himself. His blood was found on his right rear pocket,
suggesting that he placed the knife before retrieving it later in the fight.
A photo essay giving a detailed proof of this scenario is
available from the sources mentioned at the end of this document. If it is correct, then Justice Nordheimer’s
entire verdict is collapses. Please read
it for yourself.
In the appeal decision, Justice MacFarland states that there
is no basis for thinking that Nyki’s boyfriend Jeremy Wooley, known to have
participated in the final north side fight, could be the stabber. Yet in virtually the next paragraph, she
attributes the cry of “You die tonight!” as having come from Wooley. Here she is mistaken, as the only witness to
have reported that cry, Cam Bordignon, never identified any as the source of
it.
She also resurrects the ghost of the “aider” theory, already
rejected by the trial judge. Again
acknowledging the uncertainty of the Crown’s narrative to fall back on the
she’s still guilty of something theory.
Where the resulting
sentence offers the chance of parole after 12 long years, but only if you give
up your right to maintain your innocence, or else you can live out your entire
life in prison, starting from age 24.
It’s called the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” and is one the many
loathsome complications of wrongful convictions. No matter how well behaved a prisoner may be,
parole is simply not granted without the prisoner admitting guilt and
expressing “remorse”. Imagine what is
being asked of a wrongfully convicted individual. Such a person is effectively being told to
lie to preserve the system’s reputation at the expense of their own, and is
literally being held hostage until they do. It seems all too reminiscent of the tactics
used in forced “re-education” camps such as those found in totalitarian
dictatorships. Is our society really so
childish as to believe that coerced expression of “remorse” can have any value
or validity whatsoever?
Given that any newly discovered evidence might be fresh
grounds for appeal even years after a wrongful conviction, this is essentially
a violation of the cherished legal principle under which no one can be
compelled to give evidence against themselves.
Where in the
aftermath of your wrongful conviction, the nation’s top television news program
wants to interview you in prison, but the authorities refuse to allow it.
CBC’s top news program, “The Fifth Estate”, was initially
granted permission to interview Nyki by the warden at Grand Valley. Permission was withdrawn before the interview
could take place, making it virtually certain that the warden was overruled by
higher officials. It seems inconceivable
that a responsible public official would be so frivolous as to arbitrarily
reverse herself regarding very high level media access without orders from
above. This also ignores precedents in
which the media has been granted access to other inmates.
What are they hiding?
Every one of these points is a factor in the wrongful
conviction of Nicole “Nyki” Kish.
Together they make up one of the most egregious injustices I have ever
encountered. If they can convict Nyki in
this way, they can literally convict anyone of any crime at any time. That could be you, a friend or a loved one.
If I’ve caught your attention, please read on. You can begin by browsing through the additional information offered on this website. There is also a Facebook group dedicated to freeing Nyki from this terrible injustice, with more information and analysis of the wrong that was done in this case.
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