Judge, lawyers did everything they could to keep the jury from hearing about the 2017 trial
WARNING: This story has details that are hard to read.
It is a small, cramped room. White acoustic tiles cover the walls, and the floor is a bright shade of green. Two chairs are set up so that they face each other. They are close enough together that if you sat in them, your knees would almost touch.
Beginning on August 18, 2015, William Sandeson spent almost 24 hours in this room at police headquarters.
Investigators asked him a lot of questions about what happened three nights before, when Dalhousie University physics student Taylor Samson, 22, was shot and killed in his apartment.
As part of their questioning, the police reminded Sandeson, who was 23 at the time, of the “do no harm” part of the Hippocratic oath. Doctors take this oath, and Sandeson was arrested just a few days before he was to start medical school.
When he was tried for murder for the first time in 2017, the video of most of that interrogation was shown in court. But this is one piece of evidence that most of the people on the jury at his murder trial did not see.
On Wednesday, the last arguments were made by the lawyers for both sides. Sandeson’s lawyer said that Sandeson killed Samson in self-defense because of a bad drug deal. The Crown said that Sandeson had a lot of debt and didn’t want to pay for the 9 kg of marijuana that Samson had brought to the apartment.
The jurors are now cut off from the outside world as they decide if Sandeson is guilty of first-degree murder. This means that what they did not hear can now be reported.
6 different storie
In the video of Sandeson being questioned by police, he says:six different storiesabout what happened in his apartment on the night of Saturday, August 15, 2015. Sandeson didn’t pull the trigger in any of those stories. Instead, he talked about how gang members broke into his apartment, killed Samson, and took his body away.
When Sandeson was arrested, the police thought he had taken Samson hostage and told him what his rights were in this case. But as the questioning went on and more evidence was found on his phone and in his apartment, the focus of the investigation changed, and it became a murder investigation.
In the seven years since Sandeson was arrested and questioned, his lawyers have said that police should have given him a second warning because he was being charged with murder. Not at all.
Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice James Chipman agreed in motions before the current trial that Sandeson’s rights had been violated. Chipman decided that the current jury would not see any of the later police interviews. Instead, they would only see the first one, in which Sandeson was questioned as a witness and not as a suspect.
That gave Sandeson the freedom to tell the current jury a seventh version of what happened, in which he said that he had been framed.He admitted to shooting, but said he did it to protect himself.
Very different trial
The judge and lawyers in the current trial did everything they could to keep the jury from hearing about the trial in 2017. But since many of the same witnesses were called to testify, it became necessary to look at transcripts of what they said at the 2017 trial to remind them of what they had seen in August 2015.
The judge finally gave a mid-trial instruction, mentioning the 2017 trial but telling the jury not to think about it.
This trial has gone more smoothly than the one in 2017. During the 2017 trial, the jury had to leave the courtroom several times while the lawyers argued. One of the fights was about whether or not there should be a new trial.A private eye hired by the defense gave the police information.
The original judge said no to the request for a new trial. But it was the beginning of asuccessful appealwhich brought about the current trial.
In the months before the current trial, Sandeson’s lawyer tried again to get a mistrial by focusing on the actions of the private investigator. But Justice Chipman didn’t agree with that.
Dramatic testimon
The private detective gave information about the most exciting parts of both murder trials:what Justin Blades and Pookiel McCabe said in courtThe two men said that they heard a gunshot and then saw a big man slumped over and bleeding to death in Sandeson’s apartment.
Both juries didn’t see other things, like a text message that Sandeson allegedly sent four or five weeks before Samson was killed. In the story, Sandeson said he would cut up his girlfriend into pieces if he found out she was cheating on him.
The text message led people to think that Sandeson had cut up Samson’s body and maybe used chemicals to dissolve it, just like he had threatened to do to his girlfriend. But during the current trial, Sandeson said he put Samson’s body in a duffel bag, drove it from Halifax to Truro, N.S., and dumped it in a stream that led to the Bay of Fundy.
The jury in Sandeson’s 2017 trial saw most of the police interrogation video, but they didn’t see the part where an officer called Sandeson a “piece of shit” while trying to get him to talk. In Sandeson’s trial in 2017, the judge agreed that the exchange was very bad for him, so it was cut from the version that was shown to the jury.
It remains to be seen if keeping all of this information from the jury will change how they decide the case.
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