I don't feel precisely what I expected to feel at this point in the trial. Surely this is all what it looked and felt like it would be, right? Two men who, together, did a terrible, vicious, incomprehensible thing. I am not fully at ease with this in the way I thought I would be.
I was reminded that the Crown is not a beacon of truth but simply another player in the justice system, weaving a story from curated evidence that is no more and no less self-interested that the defense. Sidestepping the earlier truck sightings favour of a tidier and more convenient presentation wasn't without some cynicism. I was not expecting them to pitch the story as two men who plotted for more than a year to steal, murder and incinerate, each element being an indispensable part of the plan. One argument for this was that it doesn't take a year to steal a truck, and yet they had all the elements in place 10 months before Tim was murdered. The arguments lacks an internal consistency and seems precariously and sometimes even gratuitously piled on a record of texts that are at the very least least ambiguous at times. To me there were very clearly weak arguments at times: if your story seems to lean in part on Mark Smich turning his phone off when in reality the evidence weights the other way, I have to ask myself why you feel you need to argue that. Several examples just like that.
I didn't expect to feel so handicapped by trial by Twitter. The, I mean THE thing that pushed me to premeditation was the fireside furniture and sausages texts. It took an outsized meaning here and certainly in my mind and doesn't seem to even have been brought up by Crown in cross. We are missing so much to properly determine guilt, from a complete and unfiltered record to the wealth of information in bearing, body language, facial expressions, tone and all the things we normally use to gauge honesty and intention.
All these things together reminded me of the sobering power of the state and of the collective power of the media to shape narratives and drive public interest or indifference. Wrongful convictions flow from state overreach and greatly benefit from a pubic turned away for one reason or another. Some of the ingredients seem to be in place here and that I think is what leaves me ever so slightly uneasy with this case despite the breadth and depth of the apparent evidence: we have a Crown case that unexpectedly left me scratching my head in spots, the use of rap lyrics to prove an intent to murder, at least one member of the media whose sloppiness heard daily on air spreads ignorance in dribbles or torrents depending on the day, and who directly invites listeners to dismiss Mark Smich on facts she can't even bother to keep straight.
The general wisdom is that juries almost always get it right, so I feel like the best choice for me in this case is simply to defer to that verdict and trust it is rooted in intelligence, collective wisdom and more care for fairness and truth than we've seen from others at times in this case. They know both more and less than we do in all the ways that are supposed to make justice come out right.
Still, the world is not as easily or cleanly divided into good guys and bad guys or truth and lies as we want or imagine it to be. "Sun down in the Paris of the prairies...". It happens everyday, somewhere. And it matters.
