Nearly five years after Sammy Yatim was shot and killed on a streetcar by Toronto police Const. James Forcillo, Ontario’s highest court has upheld his 2016 conviction of attempted murder. In a unanimous decision released Monday, the panel of Chief Justice of Ontario George Strathy, Justice David Doherty and Justice Gary Trotter dismissed Forcillo’s appeal of both his conviction in the 2013 shooting death and the six-year jail sentence handed down by trial judge Justice Edward Then. The sentence — which is one year more than the mandatory minimum jail sentence for attempted murder with a firearm — “was fit,” the panel ruled, noting that Forcillo never made an “expression of remorse.” His lawyers now have the option to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada, but would have to show the issue is of national importance. Yatim, 18, died in a hail of Forcillo’s bullets on July 27, 2013, moments after exposing himself and wielding a small knife on the busy Dundas West streetcar. Within less than a minute of arriving on scene, Forcillo fired nine shots at Yatim in two distinct volleys. The officer fired three bullets in the first, including the fatal shot to Yatim’s heart. He then fired six more, as Yatim lay on the floor near the streetcar’s front doors, paralyzed and dying. The separation of the two volleys was vital to Forcillo’s conviction and formed the central basis for his appeal. A jury found Forcillo not guilty of second-degree murder in connection to the first volley, but convicted him of attempted murder for the second.Forcillo’s appeal lawyers argued the shooting should have never been divided into distinct charges, because the shooting was one continuous event.But the panel judges — two of whom, Doherty and Trotter, are considered to be the top criminal law judges on the of Court of Appeal — disagreed, while noting that the “combination of verdicts re ...
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