EZRA LEVANT ｜ Criminal lawyer weighs in on Toronto teen acquitted after self-defence shooting with illegal gun
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Summary
A teenager from Iraq uses an illegal gun to kill someone and claims it's self-defense. I'll tell you what the jury said and what the Toronto Star said in a feature interview with lawyer Ian Runkle. You don't want to miss this.
Transcript
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Hello my friends. Crazy case out of Toronto. A teenager from Iraq uses an illegal gun
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to kill someone and claims it's self-defense. I'll tell you what the jury said and what the
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Toronto Star said. It's a feature interview with lawyer Ian Runkle. You don't want to miss this.
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What an interesting story. But first let me invite you to become a subscriber to what we call Rebel
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Tonight can you use an illegal gun to kill someone in self-defense? I'll tell you a story from Toronto
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in the last crazy week. It's July 10th and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
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I saw the most amazing story in the Toronto Star the other day. It was confusing for me and it was
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confusing for the star. They didn't know quite what to make of it. Who was the good guy and who was the
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bad guy because there was guns involved and they know one thing. They don't like that. Here let me
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read a little bit to you from this story. It's just so astonishing. Jury, so there's a jury involved,
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acquits teen who claimed self-defense in a fatal Toronto school shooting saying he carried the gun
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because his neighborhood was like Iraq. Oh my god, there's so much to digest just in that
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one headline. I'm gonna I'm gonna read just a sentence or two before I bring in a legal expert
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to help me chew through this. A Toronto jury on Friday, so this was last week, acquitted a 20-year-old
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man of second-degree murder accepting his claim that he fired four shots in self-defense, believing the
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victim, 18-year-old Jefferson Guerrier, was lunging at him with a knife outside a high school in the city's
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east end. Or as I would say, just another usual day in the failed state of Toronto. The fatal shooting
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just as classes were ending for the day on Halloween in 2022 drew widespread attention due to the proximity
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to students, one of whom filmed the incident on their cell phones. So yeah, like I say, just another normal
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one. I'll just skip ahead. The man was 17 at the time. His identity is covered by a standard
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publication ban. But what's so incredible to me is that he was packing an illegal gun
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and he used it to shoot a guy he was afraid of and he was acquitted. Joining us now to talk about this
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is Ian Runkle, a criminal lawyer who has a popular YouTube channel called Runkle of the Bailey Ealing.
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Great to see you. There's so many more nuggets in that story that I'm tempted to read out, but I'd
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rather have you describe it. This kid, he was 17 at the time, obviously he was a man, was a migrant from
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Iraq. And he said that growing up in greater Toronto was as dangerous as Iraq. And I guess in
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his defense, he says he had been shot at before. And it sounds like this school was almost a war zone
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where, I mean, I don't know where my sympathies should lie. And I don't think the Toronto star
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knows either because on the one hand, they hate guns, but they love migrants. They hate self-defense,
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but they like this guy. My head's spinning. Help me out. One thing to remember is that self-defense
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cases don't necessarily have a good guy or a bad guy. A lot of self-defense cases throughout the
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Canadian case law are bad guy versus bad guy. So you can't necessarily assume that. And people have
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sort of, they say, look, this guy's got an illegal gun. So what does this mean? Well,
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it doesn't mean as much as people think. The, from what I understand, he's still facing the gun
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charge that that's going to be resolved later. And there's, you know, just because they've said it's
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not murder, doesn't mean that they're saying that it's okay for him to have had the firearm in the
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first place. So he's still facing those charges. I understand that he's in custody. We might see like
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a plea. If he's been in custody a while, he might, he might have a bunch of time served, uh, lined up,
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but Canadian law doesn't require that you'd be legally carrying a weapon in order to defend
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yourself with it. They don't say, listen, you know, you're not legally carrying this gun. So your
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responsibility is to die. If somebody attacks you with a knife, they say, if you are in that sort of
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lethal threat scenario, you can use whatever you need to, that's reasonable in self-defense and
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reasonable is going to depend on a whole bunch of things. Like, you know, it may not be reasonable
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to defend yourself against a water gun with a real gun, but a knife is a lethal threat. You know,
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if somebody's trying to stab you, that could very well kill you. So, and people have sort of latched
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on to the Iraq aspect. And I mean, on one end, you can say certainly things appear to have been
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dangerous. If somebody is attacking this guy with a knife and he's got to defend himself and maybe he
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could have been killed if he wasn't. But really, we don't know if the jury accepted that. We don't
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know if the jury was like, oh yes, it is dangerous like Iraq. Or if the jury went, nah, we think that's,
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that's no good. Cause we don't actually get to find out what juries think in Canada. We can't
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even, you know, even if you knew who the jury was, you couldn't pull one of them onto your show and
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say, hey, can you explain what the jury was thinking here? Do you know, was this, you know,
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were you persuaded? Were you not persuaded? The other thing to remember is always that Canadian
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law has the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And that's something a lot of people sort of
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find difficult to grasp because once in a self-defense case, once self-defense, there's
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an air of reality to it, that it's not sort of a ridiculous argument. The crown has to prove that
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it was not self-defense to a beyond a reasonable doubt standard. So the jury could still have been
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thinking this guy is probably the bad guy, you know, that this was probably bad self-defense,
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or even that it was very likely to be, you know, an improper killing. But if they can only get to
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very likely, that's not good enough. The standard is basically either certain or almost certain to us,
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like we sort of, if it's a legal error to give like a number to it, but typically in law school,
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they'll say like 90 to 95% certain kind of standards. So if they're anything less than that,
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if they're only like 80% sure that, you know, that this was improper, the shooting,
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then they have to acquit. Yeah. According to the Toronto Star report, the fellow was lunging at him
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with a knife. He did have a knife. It was uncertain what was in his pocket because it was sort of
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concealed. And I mean, he had been shot at before. I went to law school a long time ago, and I really
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never practiced criminal law other than when I was at the student legal clinic. But if I remember
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correctly, the law of self-defense is you shouldn't be weighed to a nicety, if I remember that phrase,
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as in, you know, jury three years later calmly, you know, oh, you weren't precise enough. It wasn't
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perfect decision-making. If, and you correct me if my memory of law school 30 years ago was wrong,
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but a jury is not supposed to be, demand perfection from someone who is in a crisis. They're being
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attacked by someone with a knife. Is he being a hundred percent careful? So I suppose that goes
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to your point also is you don't have to be perfect. If you think your life's in danger, and if that's
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reasonable, you can shoot back. Absolutely correct. And they, in fact, the line I believe is you don't
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have to weigh the, your behavior to a nicety in the face of an upraised knife. So exactly this kind
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of scenario. And one of the things that that intends to consider is that, you know, right now sitting in
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a couch, you know, with a, you know, just in a, with lots of time to think about it, you can often say,
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well, what if you would have done something else? Like what if you could have done? And it doesn't
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have to be the right answer or the perfect answer. It just has to be a reasonable response. That's the
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sort of standard that's built into the law is reasonability. And sometimes reasonable can be
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a range of things, you know, it might've been reasonable to run away, but it might've been
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reasonable not to run away these kinds of issues. So it's very much a don't sort of, you know,
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Sunday morning quarterback kind of thing. You know, you mentioned a jury trial and I don't think we
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have as many jury trials in Canada as they do in the States. You would probably know the stats better
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than me. And I can understand a jury might be more sympathetic because they might look on this,
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you know, he was 17 at the time. They might have more sympathy perhaps. But one of the things is the
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jury does not write detailed, perfectly worded reasons. And so in terms of a legal precedent,
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we don't actually know what the, what the rationale was. Like you say, was the jury impressed with
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this young man? Did he, were they on the edge? We don't know. And we just have to accept the jury.
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And I think that, I think by the way, I would trust a jury. I mean, I would imagine there might be some
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extremely technical kinds of cases, a technical kind of fraud or something that a jury might not
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be equipped to handle, but a schoolyard brawl, I can't think of anyone from any walk of life who
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wouldn't have some innate sense of that. So in this case, it worked to the benefit of the accused,
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but we just can't apply this to other situations, right? Cause we don't know they're thinking,
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there's no precedent here. Yes, absolutely. We don't know what the jury was thinking. They
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don't give reasons. We can't even ask them reasons. And sometimes their reasoning might
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be things like, we don't believe anybody. If, if they don't believe anybody in this case,
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they would just have to acquit. The other thing I sort of always caution, I get people who ask me
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about self-defense in hypotheticals all the time. Like if somebody pulls a knife on me,
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what can I do? And they can be very, very exact, like very fact specific. One little detail that
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changes between one case and the next can dramatically change the assessment. And so
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it can be very dangerous to make big assumptions from one case that like, okay, well, it's always going
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to be okay to shoot somebody if they pull a knife that, you know, it may usually be okay if they're
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trying to stab you to shoot them, but that's not always the case. And so it's very difficult in
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general. The rule in Canada would be that if you've got any other option, you should be taking the other
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option other than using lethal force. Lethal force really is always to be the last resort, but that
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doesn't mean that everybody who uses lethal force will necessarily be convicted is the other thing.
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But, um, going through the process is also itself difficult because I don't know how much, you know,
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this, uh, this young man and his family will have spent. I don't know if they got, um, you know,
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assistance with it or anything like that, but a court case, especially one involving a murder
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can be incredibly expensive. You know, six figures would not be, would not be a difficult spend
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on something like that. And so if he had some legal aid, if his family sounds like they were
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refugees from Iraq, uh, who knows, perhaps he was some wealthy merchant, but it doesn't sound that way.
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So I guess one thing you've really helped me think through clearly is if the act of shooting
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a would-be knife killer was found defensible or he was acquitted of it, that doesn't mean he's off
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the hook. As you say, he's still in jail. So he is, it sounds like he's facing other firearms
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offenses, having the thing. It was just the killing his assailant that was excused. So this, even if this
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were a judge written ruling, it might help us understand the law of defending yourself, but it
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wouldn't necessarily give any lenience to, well, how did you get the gun? Who did you get the gun
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from? Why were you carrying the gun? And by the way, he got it from a friend where, I mean, it sounds
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like this was a terrible neighborhood. It sounds like he, he's not too far from the truth when he
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describes it like Iraq. I tell you one thing, when I was growing up at my high school, there weren't
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people bringing knives and guns around. It sounds like a pretty rough place. It sounds like those
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things are still before the courts, perhaps, even if that one part of the story, the shooting is now
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closed. Absolutely. And this is very common. You'll see court cases where, for instance, a drug dealer
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was attacked by a rival drug dealer and, you know, they have a gunfight. The loser, of course, dies,
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but the winner ends up, you know, they get cleared on the murder charges or, but they still end
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up, you know, you'll see like a sentence of three years or something like that because you
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had the gun, you were not allowed to have the gun. So they end up doing some time over
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that. But of course, the drug dealer is probably happier doing the three years than being the
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other guy in that gunfight. So it, it also becomes a little difficult because if you don't
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have the firearm in a self-defense case, well, so I don't know that there's really a good answer
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here. And unfortunately we're just sort of as a society left to choose from a range of bad answers,
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but that, um, all the people who've said that, you know, he's getting away scot-free are probably
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wrong. There's probably going to be some sentence for having the firearm itself.
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Now, I, I know we don't have all the facts in front of us, but a few weeks ago, also in the
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greater Toronto area, we, we heard of a fella who, I think he had a Lamborghini parked out front of
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his house and someone tried to steal it and, and he, he brought out a long arm and I'm just going
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from memory here. And he was charged also, if I'm not mistaken. Um, I think police generally don't like
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it when a lawful firearm owner uses it for home defense. It's very much a different approach than
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many parts of the United States. I'm not saying all America is as pro self-defense as, as all of it.
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I mean, there are some jurisdictions where it's a lot tougher to have a firearm, but, um, it seems to
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me like police and prosecutors in Canada want to stamp out any big ideas that ordinary citizens may have
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about using firearms or acquiring firearms for self-defense. It's just a feeling I get. Um, what
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are your thoughts on that? We've seen some actually really egregious examples of this, uh, the case of
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Ian Thompson. I don't know if that's a one that you covered, uh, some years ago, but, um, people were
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firebombing his house. He was a lawful gun owner. He in fact was a firearm instructor and he was able to
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get a revolver out of his storage. Uh, he was able to load it. He escaped the house and fired warning
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shots into the air, not even at anybody. And initially they charged him with respect to sort
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of the use of the firearm, but they dropped that and later pursued storage issues. And their theory
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was basically, if you could get the gun out in time to not die in this attack, that clearly the gun must
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have been, um, misstored. And this is a, this is a bit of a concern. I always tell people like,
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if you end up defending yourself with a firearm, a lawfully owned firearm, you should expect to get
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charged. And there's another case that didn't involve a firearm. A woman was being attacked by
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her boyfriend and was nearly killed by him. But in the course of the struggle managed to get ahold of a
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knife and stabbed him. She was so badly injured that when she went to the neighbors, they thought
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it must be a Halloween costume because it was October and they just didn't think that there
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could be that much blood. Uh, but she had killed him in defending herself and ultimately they dropped
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the charges against her. They said it was one of the clearest examples of a self-defense case,
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but she spent many months in jail, uh, because it was, you know, she's charged with a murder and
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these cases become very difficult because when they ultimately say that it's one of the clearest
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cases of self-defense and they dropped the charges, they can't give her those months back.
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So I would really like to see more discretion from prosecutors to say things like, well,
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you know, we can lay a murder charge anytime. There's no, there's no limitation period that's
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going to stop them. And maybe they could take a few minutes to say, Hey, slow down. Let's try to
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figure out, could this be self-defense? And if self-defense is sort of reasonably on the table
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to sit and have a, a real think about, you know, are we taking the side of the bad guys? Are we
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causing more harm perhaps than is necessary? And yeah.
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I mean, I, there's one moment in policing, big city Canadian policing that I just don't think I'll
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ever forget. And that was, uh, about a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago when the Toronto
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police were giving advice to people who were suffering from home invasion robberies, where
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they had a nice car outside, the thieves would bust into the house to get the key fobs to drive the
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car away. It wasn't so much committing a crime in the house. They just wanted the keys. And the advice
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that the cops had was have your keys near the door. So the home invaders don't have to go rummaging
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for it. And it was said deadpan. And I think that just sort of marked a kind of helplessness. Like
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when I heard that, I heard, Hey guys, you're on your own, by the way, you're on your own. The only
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advice we have is to mitigate it. Uh, don't fight back. Don't like, there was no, there was no advice
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there on how to stop a crime or how to, uh, it was how to make the crime less painful.
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To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs at your front door
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because they're breaking into your home to steal your car. They don't want anything else. A lot of
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them that they're arresting have guns on them and they're not toy guns. They're real guns.
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I'm worried. Ian, if we, if we have the crime growth that I think we have, I was just looking
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the other day and in terms of certain violent crimes, Canada is now on par with the United
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States. And I think this is a trend that's only happened in the last few years. I think
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the Canadian identity was always, Oh, we're not as violent as Americans, certainly not, um,
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as gun happy as Americans. But I think we are being menaced by crime. And I think if the police,
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if the best the police can do is, uh, tell you to, to think back and lie back and think of Queen
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Victoria as you're being robbed. I think you're going to see more of a vigilantism out of desperation,
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other than maybe the very wealthy who can afford to live in privately patrolled neighborhoods.
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I, I think this has been an issue in rural Canada for a while too, where farmers have been protecting
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themselves against rural crime because cops are so far away. Um, I'm just worried that our identity
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of a safer place in the States is no longer accurate. I think, I think we're turning into
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an unsafe country, but ordinary citizens don't have the same second amendment rights as Americans do.
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What do you think of that? I think, uh, it's, it is becoming concerning. A lot of people are,
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are concerned. I get more people who reach out to me asking like, how do I get a gun? And in a lot of
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cases, it's like, maybe the gun isn't your first answer, but like a better door and so forth. But
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we're seeing a trend towards more brazen home invasions. It used to be that whenever I saw a home
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invasion, my first thought was drugs. Uh, it, it used to be that the people targeting like being
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targeted were almost exclusively, uh, you know, involved in drug trafficking or owed a drug debt
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or something along those lines. And there was some reason for that, but now we're starting to see
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more that more of the home invasions. I don't know if the number has gone up, uh, that much,
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but I'm seeing more of them targeted at just kind of the ordinary, ordinary citizen who had no reason
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to expect that their door would be being kicked down. I was just reading a case not long ago where
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the, uh, the homeowner said, thank God for that gun because four people kicked down in their door and
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they had, you know, the, the people invading had hammers and it was her, her husband and their 11 year
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old and the husband gets a legally owned shotgun, but he, because of the storage laws, he wasn't able
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to load it. And thankfully they didn't call his bluff because if they'd called his bluff, you know,
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they might've beaten him to death. It might've been really bad, but instead they see the shotgun and they
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say, uh, you know, check, please. And they're out the door. I I'm concerned, uh, rural Canadians have
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been sort of complaining about this for a long time saying, listen, when we're in danger, that the
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police are too far away, they're 45 minutes out. And this was a big part of the urban rural divide in
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Canada is that you had rural people saying, we need better protections. We need better self-help
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options and mostly urban Canadians and especially urban Canadians from sort of wealthier, you know,
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more privileged backgrounds who live in nicer, more secure neighborhoods. We're saying, well,
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just call the police. And now we're seeing more of the people who were in neighborhoods they thought
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were nicer going, um, maybe the police aren't going to be, uh, aren't going to be there if I, if I need
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them. And I don't know what the solution is, but we have a problem. And I certainly at least an optics
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problem and people deserve to feel safe. It's, it's, it's very concerning. And I, I guess I'll, I have to
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think on how to, how to fix it, but it's, um, it is certainly a problem that needs to be addressed and
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needs to be, uh, needs to be fixed. Well, you know, I've enjoyed our conversation so much. We started off
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talking about that one case, but we covered a lot of ground. I feel a lot smarter now than I did just 20
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minutes ago. I'm really grateful for your time. I'd like to encourage my followers to follow you
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on YouTube at Runkle of the Bailey. And do you have a Twitter account as well? An X account?
00:24:29.080
I have a Twitter account. It's, uh, at Ian Runkle, I A N R U N K L E. Um, I think if you put in,
00:24:36.700
like, just do search for Runkle of the Bailey, you'll get me on various platforms. And, uh,
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I've really enjoyed our conversation. So thank you so much for having me on.
00:24:46.180
Well, our great pleasure. I really feel like you've given us a lot of
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really useful information. Take care and, uh, keep fighting for justice.
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There he is. Ian Runkle of Runkle of the Bailey. Very interesting conversation.
00:25:03.020
Well, I recorded today's show a little bit early because when I would normally be in the studio,
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I was out and about in Amish country, I'll have an Amish update for you when I get back until next
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time on behalf of all of us at rebel world headquarters to you at home. Good night. Keep