Lawyers for Winnipeg man accused of killing 4 women argue media coverage has tainted jury

The majority of the people selected to start hearing evidence in the trial of a man accused of murdering four women in Winnipeg shouldn't be allowed to serve on the jury because they admitted they'd heard about the case before, an expert called by the accused's defence team testified on Tuesday.

Jeremy Skibicki's lawyers are pushing for his case to be heard instead by a judge alone, over concerns about the possible effects of pretrial publicity on the 12 jurors and two alternates selected last week.

"Once you've been exposed to pretrial publicity, you now take information in during trial in a manner that's different than you would have if you hadn't been exposed to it. You will not be aware of this process, because it's unconscious," Christine Ruva, a U.S.-based psychologist and expert on the effects of pretrial publicity, told court via video conference during the second day of Skibicki's first-degree murder trial.

"It isn't necessarily that jurors are wilfully disobeying instructions. It's because of these cognitive mechanisms — even if they want to be a good juror, they may be unable to do so because of exposure to this information."

It's the second motion the defence has made to stop the trial from being decided by a jury, after Manitoba Court of King's Bench Chief Justice Glenn Joyal rejected a similar motion earlier this year.

Jurors have not yet appeared in court during the trial, which started on Monday and is expected to last six weeks. They are expected to start hearing evidence on May 8.

Skibicki, 37, was again brought into court with his ankles shackled and sat silently in the courtroom Tuesday as Ruva testified. 

He has pleaded not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder in the 2022 deaths of three First Nations women — Morgan Harris, 39, Marcedes Myran, 26, and Rebecca Contois, 24 — and a fourth unidentified woman, who has been given the name Mashkode Bizhiki'ikwe, or Buffalo Woman, by community members.

Roughly two years ago, in mid-May, partial human remains later identified as belonging to Contois were discovered in a garbage bin near a Winnipeg apartment building. The following month, police recovered more of her remains from the Brady Road landfill in south Winnipeg.

Police said their investigation determined the three other women had been killed between March and May 2022 — before Contois died. Myran's and Harris's remains are believed to be in the Prairie Green landfill north of Winnipeg, according to police.

They have said they believe Mashkode Bizhiki'ikwe was Indigenous and in her mid-20s, but the location of her remains is unknown.

Ruva said research suggests exposure to negative pretrial publicity about an accused person leads to a better chance that person will be found guilty by a jury — and that the more of those stories a juror has seen, the more biased they'll be.

Of the 12 jurors picked to decide Skibicki's case last Thursday, seven said they'd heard something about the case before coming to court that day. One of the two alternates chosen for the jury said they'd heard about the case.

But beyond answering yes or no questions that included whether they had heard anything about the case, potential jurors were not asked how much coverage or what specific information they'd seen.