A man sentenced to nine years in prison for shooting his victim twice in the face near Pine Lake has lost an appeal of his conviction.
Cory Lavallee was convicted by a jury of attempted murder in November 2016 and sentenced the following January.
Lavallee shot and wounded Donald Bernie Brown, then 31, at a rural residence in the Pine Lake area on June 2, 2014. Brown was hit in the face by a round from a .22-calibre rifle that dropped him to the ground. Lavallee shot his victim again in the face as he lay on the ground.
Despite his wounds, Brown fled to a neighbouring residence for help.
During the trial, the jury saw segments of a videotaped police interview with Lavallee, taken about three weeks after the shooting, in which he confessed to shooting Brown.
“Yeah, I shot Donnie. I’m sorry for shooting Donnie. Right. I am,” he told police on the second day of questioning.
However, when testifying in his trial, Lavallee said he was not the shooter. He said that he took the blame because he feared for his and his family’s safety from higher-ups in the drug trade. He said he could not identify the real shooter for fear of repercussion.
A voir dire — basically, a trial within a trial to rule on admissibility of evidence — took place. The judge ruled that the confession was voluntary and allowed it as evidence.
Lavallee’s appeal says the judge erred in interpreting and applying the legal test for voluntary confessions and by not cautioning the jury about the dangers of false confessions and their relationship to wrongful convictions.
The three justices who heard the appeal last May 9 disagreed.
Trial judge Justice Terrance Clackson “neither misapprehended the test for voluntariness, nor the standard of proof required to assess whether the Crown had met that test,” says the appeal judges’ memorandum of judgment.
The appeal judges also rejected that the trial judge made a mistake by not providing a strong caution to the jury about the reliability of Lavallee’s confession.
It is up to the trial judge to decide if a caution to the jury on the potential for false confessions is required.
“Rather than caution the jury about the danger of false confessions, the trial judge gave a detailed charge regarding the jury’s assessment of the appellant’s credibility,” says the appeal panel.
“We are not persuaded that the trial judge erred in exercising his discretion not to caution the jury on the danger of false confessions.”
pcowley@reddeeradvocate.com
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