Saskatoon defence lawyer Silas Halyk leaves powerful legacy of advocacy

It was a defining moment in one of the highest profile inquiries in Saskatchewan's history.

In 2003, Justice Minister Eric Cline ordered a public inquiry into the death of 17-year-old Neil Stonechild more than a decade earlier, including Stonechild's contact with members of the Saskatoon Police Service.

Stonechild's family believed the teen had been in police custody the night he froze to death in November 1990. Defence lawyer Silas Halyk represented the then-Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations at the inquiry. 

Halyk showed close-up photos of Stonechild's face —  his body had been exhumed as part of the case's re-investigation  — on a three-metre high screen in the packed hotel ballroom where the inquiry took place, then superimposing handcuffs onto the injuries on the teen's face. The handcuff bracelets fit precisely into the grooves across the bridge of the teen's nose. 

"I'm telling you that any reasonable person in my mind, looking at those photographs and the superimposition of the handcuffs, can't resist coming to a conclusion that those are handcuff markings," Halyk told CBC in a 2005 interview.

"It says to me that, at some point in time, Neil Stonechild was in police custody."

Don Worme represented Stonechild's family at the inquiry.

"It had the impact that I think that one could anticipate it would have," he said.

"I think it's fair to say that Mr. Halyk played that with the kind of skill and delicacy that one would expect."

Commissioner David Wright ultimately concluded that Neil Stonechild had been in police custody the night he died.

Halyk, a legend in Saskatchewan's legal community, died on Dec. 2. He was 86.

According to the Law Society of Saskatchewan, Silas Eugene Halyk studied at the University of Saskatchewan and was called to the bar in July 1962. Three years later he took a break to pursue post-graduate studies at University of Michigan.

He returned to Saskatoon in 1966 and resumed a career that would span the next five decades.

"He was sort of the last of the people that had a very diverse criminal and civil practice," said Saskatoon defence lawyer Mark Brayford.