Why a single piece of evidence mattered so much in Dennis Oland murder case
From the earliest days in Dennis Oland’s murder trial, the Crown faced an uphill battle to convince jurors that a precarious balance of circumstantial evidence added up to a guilty verdict.
Nonetheless, in December jurors found the member of the clan that owns Moosehead Breweries guilty of the second-degree murder of his father, as family members wept loudly in the Saint John courtroom.
On Monday, New Brunswick’s appeal court overturned the verdict, based on the trial judge’s lack of caution to jurors about how much weight to place on an alleged lie by Oland about the colour of the jacket he wore on July 6, 2011.
Greg Marquis, the author of the book Truth and Honour about the trial, said in a telephone interview that it’s not surprising that a single piece of evidence could be so central, given that the Crown’s case was a weave of evidence, and “all was circumstantial.”