The case against a former Huntsville High School teacher crumbled when the judge in the case found “collusion or collaboration” between two Crown witnesses.
Last week Jordan Riley was acquitted on charges of sexual exploitation and sexual assault stemming from alleged incidents that occurred with a minor in 2003.
In delivering his verdict at the Bracebridge courthouse June 8, Justice John McCarthy said the Crown’s case rested almost exclusively on the credibility and reliability of the complainant and her mother, who both testified during the week-long trial which took place in Bracebridge in April of this year.
A publication ban restricts the publishing of any information that could identify the complainant.
A key problem with the prosecution, according to McCarthy, was that the complainant’s mother changed her statement to police.
“I am troubled by the circumstances in which (the mother) changed her statement…,” he said. “It persuades me that her evidence was certainly influenced and possibly even manipulated. This greatly undermines the confidence of this court not just in the reliability of the evidence of both the complainant and (the mother) (a critical corroborating witness to the offence), but in the entire way the evidence against the accused was collected and prepared for trial.”
The mother had originally given a different account of where the incidents took place, and implied that a single incident took place, when the complaint said there had, in fact, been two incidents. The mother later submitted a second statement, which was more in line with the complaint’s recollection of the events.
“I find it difficult to accept that the precise detail of the alleged crime scene would have been something that the complainant left out or that (the mother) misunderstood in 2015 (when she first heard about the allegations from her daughter),” said McCarthy. “In my view, this collusion or collaboration between these witnesses, whether deliberate, careless, or otherwise, serves to taint and infect the evidence of both witnesses. Taken together with the other problems with their respective testimony, I am drawn to the inexorable conclusion that their collective evidence is not credible and cannot be relied upon.”
The Justice also said the complainant’s narrative was problematic. He acknowledged that the events took place 20 years ago; the content was sensitive and difficult; that she was under some stress when testifying and that a person having suffered physical abuse may have adopted coping strategies for shutting out unpleasant memories from the past but he said there were still too many problems to ignore.
“She chose to explain inconsistencies, gaps, and contradictions in her testimony by referencing the frailties of her memory, or as she termed it, her ‘complicated” memory,’ he said. “This would not be so difficult to accept if these deficiencies did not relate almost exclusively to the pieces of evidence which undermined the believability of her version of events.”
McCarthy said the complainant’s evidence was often punctuated by long pauses, “as if she was searching for answers which would preserve the plausibility of her narrative when she recognized that what she had stated earlier was untenable or that a truthful answer to the question posed might serve to undermine that narrative.”
He said he also found the complaint to be “evasive” and her testimony characterized by “multiple internal and external contradictions and contained inconsistencies regarding material aspects of the accusations.”
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“A publication ban restricts the publishing of any information that could identify the complainant.”
No penalty for collusion. Not even your name is made public with false accusations.
Anyone can severely damage anyone’s reputation at any time for no reason at all.
In some areas the name of the accused cannot be published unless found guilty.
Not here.
Guilty until proven innocent.
20!! years later.