Hung jury. Acquittal. Guilty. Three trials, three juries, three different results with the same accused and the same key evidence. York Region Police officer Remo Romano, charged with dangerous driving causing death after he killed an 18-year-old woman in 2014, experienced all possible verdicts from a jury prompting his lawyer William MacKenzie to decry the justice system as a “crapshoot” after the third trial in 2018.Romano’s case is an exception — but when a case is tried for the second time or third or even a fourth time, like in the unique case of convicted killer Robert Badgerow, it is not uncommon to get different verdicts, especially when a jury is deciding.Two recent high-profile retrials — both several years after the first trial — show how different and challenging the process can be a second time around. After the second trial for Christopher Husbands in the 2012 Eaton Centre shooting, in which the defence presented more evidence in support of post-traumatic stress disorder, a jury last month returned a verdict of two counts of manslaughter — lesser charges than the second-degree murder convictions from his first jury trial three years ago.Philip Grandine was initially charged with the first-degree murder of his pregnant wife, Karissa Grandine, and was ultimately convicted of manslaughter in 2014. After successfully appealing his conviction, Grandine faced a second jury trial — for manslaughter, not murder — in which the Crown could not argue he intended to kill his wife. A jury found him guilty of manslaughter again on Thursday.“The result in any trial is a complex combination of the evidence and the way it comes out, what evidence is available, what evidence the lawyers choose to put forward, how witnesses testify,” said Lisa Dufraimont, a criminal law professor at Osgoode Hall. That means a trial is different every time, even if the basic allegations don’t change. Retrials can ...
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