There came a time when, at last, Chris Murphy almost lost it.
He’s a court-appointed lawyer representing LeRoy St. Germaine, the publisher of Your Ward News (YWN), a newsletter that hails from the east end of Toronto.
St. Germaine, 76, is one of two men charged with uttering death threats against sophisticated political operatives Warren and Lisa Kinsella.
The other is James Sears, the editor-in-chief of YWN.
Murphy was cross-examining Ms. Kinsella, who like her husband, plainly had little patience for it or the process. Murphy was questioning her in particular about a piece she wrote in December of 2016, in which she raged against the newsletter and accused Sears of “rape advocacy” in a recent piece he’d written.
Murphy was attempting to make the point that the battle between the Kinsellas and Sears and St. Germaine was, as he said at one point, “a bare knuckles fight between these two political groups.”
Ms. Kinsella refused to give an inch, and when Murphy dared suggest that the offending Sears piece may have been satirical — and since it made an unfathomable link between rape and jury nullification that surely was at least a possibility — she bristled.
“Look,” Murphy said, “I’m not here to stick up for this (meaning the particular piece or the paper) …
Ms. Kinsella sniffed, “Sounds like it.”
It was the lowest of blows, that old business of confusing the client — and all his alleged sins — with his lawyer.
It happened most recently earlier this year when lawyer John Norris, who for a time represented Omar Khadr, was appointed as a judge of the Federal Court of Canada. The appointment was much criticized, including by a Conservative MP named Shannon Stubbs as an “utter embarrassment,” and then that criticism denounced, correctly, by many who pointed out that the lawyer merely defends a client and is not some manifestation of him.
In fact, the day before, when Warren Kinsella — himself a lawyer and thus someone who should know better — testified, he was asked about the time he did the same thing.
He described a distinguished lawyer, who had dared represent the newsletter and Sears and St. Germaine in another proceeding, as “the Nazis’ lawyer,” the offensive suggestion that he wouldn’t have been representing them if he didn’t share their beliefs.
Murphy might have told the Kinsellas — but didn’t — that he was asked by the court to represent St. Germaine, as indeed was George Gray, who represents Sears, for Legal Aid rates. In other words, while it’s always a grotesque mistake to assume that the lawyer is indivisible from his client, it’s particularly unfair when a judge has in fact asked him to do the court a favour. Kinsella denied trying to demean the lawyer.
It was a telling moment, because the Kinsellas appear to share the view that by fighting to shut down the YWN newsletter — in a variety of ways — they are doing noble work that must not be called into question or doubted in any manner.
I don’t think it’s a call to action when you compare it to what was written about us
For instance, Mr. Kinsella on Oct. 19, 2015, tweeted a link to a blog that not only ran a picture of Sears, and his dog, but also his home address, a picture of his car and its licence plate. The blogger wrote that since Sears “seems to think he can sexually harass people and promote all kinds of racist Nazi bullshit with little consequence … here’s his home address and some personal info for anyone who’s interested.”
Mr. Kinsella denied knowing what the blog actually said, but eventually acknowledged he’d sent the tweet.
Ms. Kinsella, for her part, engaged in protracted hair-splitting; her husband didn’t actually write the tweet himself, and several times attempted to correct Murphy for having the temerity to question her about this. “I came here to speak about the threat that was made against us,” she said once.
And while she insisted that Sears’ alleged threat against them was “a call to action,” she denied that what her husband had tweeted was similarly a call to action. “No,” she said, after a long pause, “I don’t think it’s a call to action when you compare it to what was written about us.”
The comparison, then, between the two.
Interestingly, as Sears wrote he suspected the complaint had been made by someone affiliated with or inspired by the Kinsellas.
Ms. Kinsella said Wednesday that she was told the complaint had been made by Richard Warman, an Ottawa lawyer who has made his bones as a regular complainant about hate crimes at the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
Warman, Ms. Kinsella allowed, was an original supporter of the Kinsellas’ anti-YWN group called STAMP (Standing Together Against Mailing Prejudice), which successfully fought to see Canada Post ordered to stop delivering the paper.
What Sears wrote was that he’d not disclosed the CAS complaint against him before because “there was the chance that some hothead … would lose it and do something illegal, like bludgeon the Kinsellas to death … I chose to turn the other cheek and let enough time pass for (those) people to react with cool heads.”
Now that, Ms. Kinsella said, was a call to action, a threat to “me, my husband, our six children and my grandchild.”
What her husband tweeted, complete with the blogger’s information about where Sears lives and what he drives, however, was not.
What’s sauce for the goose, you see, isn’t sauce for the gander, not when you’re doing God’s work.
The trial before Ontario Court Judge Dan Moore is expected to conclude Thursday.
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