Manitoba court orders new trial for man convicted of killing Winnipeg woman when he was a teen

Manitoba's highest court has overturned the conviction of a man who was found guilty of killing a Winnipeg woman when he was 16, after finding the trial judge's failure to properly instruct the jury prejudiced his right to a fair trial.

The provincial Court of Appeal said in its decision the judge failed to correctly instruct the jury on how to weigh statements the youth made in the immediate aftermath of the 2019 killing of Lise Danais, ordering a new trial.

Danais, 51, was found with brutal injuries in her home near the Royal Canadian Mint in the morning of March 26, 2019. She was rushed to hospital, but died shortly afterward.

A jury found the youth, who was known to Danais, guilty of second-degree murder in the death in 2022. He was given the maximum seven-year sentence for youths.

Because he was a youth at the time, the man cannot be named under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, and CBC News is not revealing some details in the case as they could identify him. 

During the trial, the Crown argued he was the only person with the time and opportunity to kill her, and that he had carefully planned it out.

But the appeal court found arguments by the prosecution that some of the youth's statements to police and 911 operators had been deliberate lies meant to support his innocence were weak, and that the Crown failed to provide any evidence they were fabrications.

"The Crown was not only arguing that the young person's statements were untruthful and should be disbelieved, but that he made those untruthful statements because he knew that he had killed the deceased," Justice Holly Beard wrote on behalf of the court in the 47-page decision.

"The Crown was inviting the jury to draw the impermissible inference that the disbelieved statements were evidence of guilt."

The trial judge instructed the jury they could use the evidence to support an inference of guilt after weighing in and rejecting any innocent explanation for the statements.

But the appeal court's decision said the judge should have instructed them to ignore the statements, as the Crown didn't provide any evidence they were lies.

"Even if the jury found that some of the conduct was false, that finding could not be used as evidence of guilt, unless that conduct was fabricated," the decision said. 

"In fact, [the judge's] instruction states the opposite — it directs that after-the-fact conduct that has no innocent explanation (i.e., a lie) can be used to infer guilt."

The youth called 911 to say he found the body at about 10:43 a.m. He said he left the house at around 7:30 a.m. to run some errands, assuming Danais was still asleep because her bedroom door was closed.