Montsion trial on month-long hiatus while judge ponders charter question
Warning: Videos contain violent and graphic images
The manslaughter trial of an Ottawa police officer is on hold while a judge decides whether Const. Daniel Montsion's charter rights were violated by the Special Investigations Unit's handling of a key piece of video evidence.
Montsion's trial will go on a four-week hiatus while Justice Robert Kelly decides whether or not to throw out the charges related to the death of Abdirahman Abdiin July 2016.
The video in question, captured by a surveillance camera in the foyer of Abdi's Hintonburg apartment building,is the centrepiece of the Crown's case against Montsion, who has pleaded not guilty to manslaughter, aggravated assault and assault with a weapon.
The judge has heard from several witnesses including five days of testimony from the Crown's video expertabout whether the SIU was negligent in its handling of the video.
The defence claims the only version the SIUobtained is marred by speed and playback issues, and says investigatorsallowed some datato be lost.
The Crown will argue the video file contains all the original data from the surveillance system.
'A good movie,' but is it fiction?
SIU investigators had trouble playing the video from the moment they received it. The images on the screen would seem to freeze, then jump forward.
At one point, the videoappeared to showa second officer push Abdi to the ground with unnatural speed.An exported MP4 version of the video shows Abdi fall more slowly and smoothly.
It's a crucial moment on the video, as defence lawyers have hinted they'll argue it was that fall thatcaused Abdi'sfatalinjuries, not the punches from Montsion.
The Crown tasked video expert Ed Segeren with finding the truth.
Segeren, who has a background in television and film post-production, took a snapshot of each frame of the original file, then edited them together into a new video that played at a consistent rate of 30 frames per second.
He told the court his version eliminated the technical issues found in the original file.
"It's a good movie," he said.
But Segeren has yet to be qualified as an expert by the judge, and while heinsisted during cross-examination that his video represents the truth, the defence insists his "good movie" is fiction.
Data tells a different story
Defence lawyer Solomon Friedman took the court through what he claimsis the underlying metadata associated with each frame of the original file,and found that each image on screen represented different lengthsof time.
While some frames represent roughly 30 milliseconds, as intended, others represent as few as 10 milliseconds or as many as 110.
Segeren, who billed himself as a forensic video expert, told the court he didn't think to examine the underlyingdata, and he wouldn't have known how.
But he refused to accept the defence's data was accurate.
"Your creation is not faithful to the underlying data, which you did not know existed," Friedman told Segeren.
Decision May 29
The defence also found that Segeren missed frames and stretched the dimensions of his video, which made some distances appear greater than the actually were.
Those factors together call into question whether Segeren's video was a true representation of the speed at which events actually took place.
Segeren also examined the surveillance system that recorded the original video, which was seized by the SIU after the trial began nearly three years after the incident. He found it to be in working order, with no major issues.
The Crown hopes to have him qualified as a witness when they argue that Montsion has everything he needs to defend himself against the charges he faces.
The judge will make a decision on May 29.
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