A judge has ruled the trial of a Winnipeg man accused of killing four women in 2022 will still be heard by a jury.
Court of King’s Bench Chief Justice Glenn Joyal on Friday dismissed a defence motion that argued the case should be heard by a judge alone because of concerns that publicity surrounding the case has tainted the jury pool.
Lawyers for Jeremy Skibicki, 37, made arguments on that motion in court this week, just days before a jury is expected to start hearing evidence in the first-degree murder trial.
“While it is expected that jurors, much like judges, are shaped by their lived experience — including the media they ingest — in the Canadian judicial system, we believe jurors are able to rise to the heightened expectation required of their role, in order to ensure a fair trial is provided an accused person,” Joyal said in a brief oral decision before a silent courtroom, as people leaned forward in their seats to hear him.
It’s the second motion the defence has made to try to stop the trial from being decided by a jury, after Joyal rejected a similar motion earlier this year.
Jurors in the case, who were selected last week, have not yet appeared in court. They’re expected to start hearing evidence on Wednesday.
Skibicki has has pleaded not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of three First Nations women — Morgan Harris, 39, Marcedes Myran, 26, and Rebecca Contois, 24 — and a fourth, unidentified woman, who has been given the name Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, or Buffalo Woman, by community members.
His lawyers said this week they plan to argue he’s not criminally responsible in those deaths because of mental disorder.
Skibicki sat in court with his ankles shackled throughout court proceedings this week, as some family members of the victims and their supporters listened from the gallery.
Lawyers for the accused and the Crown made their closing arguments Wednesday on the motion for the trial to be before a judge alone, with the defence raising concerns about whether jurors can be impartial given how much publicity has surrounded the case and the potential for unconscious bias.
Prosecutors pushed back against those arguments, pointing out that all the jurors picked to hear the case told a judge they could be impartial, and that just under half said they had never heard about the case to begin with.
The defence motion leaned heavily on a poll Skibicki’s legal team commissioned earlier this year, in which nearly all respondents said they had heard about the case, and a large proportion said they believed the accused is guilty.
Court also heard earlier this week from two experts called by the defence, including the pollster whose company conducted that survey. He testified the sample used was representative of Winnipeg and Manitoba.
The defence also called a U.S.-based expert on the effect of pretrial publicity on jury verdicts, who worked with Skibicki’s defence team to create the questions asked in the poll. She testified the effects of pretrial publicity can be extremely difficult for jurors to overcome.
Roughly two years ago, in mid-May, partial human remains later identified as Contois’s were found in a garbage bin near a Winnipeg apartment building. The following month, police recovered more of her remains from the Brady Road landfill in south Winnipeg.
Police said their investigation determined the three other women were killed between March and May 2022 — before Contois died. Police said they believe Myran’s and Harris’s remains are in the Prairie Green landfill north of Winnipeg.
They have said they believe Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe was Indigenous and in her mid-20s, but the location of her remains is unknown.