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As Ali’s retrial opened this week in a Toronto courtroom, Crown attorney Beverley Olesko outlined a familiar prosecution theory: Ali smothered Cynara, who had cerebral palsy, made up a story of a home invasion and then staged the Ali family’s Scarborough home to make it look like one had happened.
“That is the Crown’s case in a nutshell,” Olesko told Superior Court Justice Jane Kelly, presiding over the judge-alone trial after the Ontario Court of Appeal quashed Ali’s conviction and life sentence in 2021, finding her first trial judge made errors in his charge to the jury.
In his opening remarks, Ali’s co-counsel James Lockyer reiterated the defence’s case that Cynara was indeed the victim of a home invasion “gone wrong.”
Ali was a loving mother to four girls, including Cynara, who was raised in a “home of love,” Lockyer said.
“She didn’t die at the hands of Cindy Ali,” he said. “Cindy Ali loved her daughter to bits.”
Cynara died in hospital after being resuscitated by first responders Ali herself called on Feb. 19, 2011. In her 911 call and at her first trial in 2016, Ali described a break-in, saying two men, one armed with a handgun, had barged in looking for a package.
The retrial began Tuesday with the playing of that 911 call, followed by the testimony of key witness Semahj Bujokas, the Toronto firefighter who tended to Cynara as the first person to enter the home — getting the teen’s pulse back was “a big deal” and “the greatest feeling,” he said.
As for Ali’s version of what happened, Bujokas gave an account consistent with his testimony in the first trial, saying he almost immediately decided there had been no break-in, citing his recollection that there was snow on the ground but he saw no footprints.
On the 911 call, he can be heard loudly telling Ali — lying on the floor near Cynara — “Get up, hey you, get up. Get off the floor … there are no footprints on the floor, don’t bulls--- me.”
Under cross-examination, Lockyer pressed Bujokas on his insistence there had been snow — photo and video evidence from that day suggested otherwise — before grilling him over text messages he sent to documentary filmmaker Sherien Barsoum as she was making the film “Cynara,” which follows Ali’s case up to her successful appeal.
In one exchange, the firefighter expressed anger at Ali’s release on bail, in part due to a COVID-19 outbreak at the jail. “That’s bulls---, that she is out. I’ll be pissed if they don’t send her back,” Bujokas wrote in a message Lockyer read out for the court.
Another: “If it’s a retrial, I will make sure every question I want asked is asked, there will be no doubt, no question, and no chance, the outcome will be the same.”
The conversations were part of an effort by Barsoum to get Toronto Fire Services permission to have Bujokas appear in the documentary. None was given, which upset Bujokas, who had also told Barsoum he would not participate if the film was “backing” Ali.
Denying Lockyer’s suggestion the veteran firefighter has a “vested interest” in the case, Bujokas said: “This case only mattered to me when I brought the girl back to life.”
(“Cynara” airs on CBC’s documentary Channel on Oct. 22; I am in the film, as I followed the case after the 2016 conviction.)
On Wednesday, a recording of Ali’s more than two-hour interview with police — conducted on Feb. 19, 2011, by now-retired Toronto police homicide detective Renata Louhikari — was played in its entirety.
In it, Ali who had not seen her daughter since she was taken to SickKids hospital, described Cynara’s life and the family’s love for her, and spoke of what happened that day when she said two Black men with Jamaican accents, one armed with a gun, barged into the family’s townhome in a complex on Burrows Hall Boulevard.
Ali told the detective how she had been home alone with her daughter, who had several seizures the night before, before detailing how the men moved in and through the house.
The man with the gun took Ali through the house looking for a “package,” which was not found, she said. At one point, she said, she saw the other intruder standing over Cynara in the living room holding a pillow.
In the interview, she said she tried twice to break away to get to her daughter. After succeeding the second time, she found Cynara silent, with her eyes open.
“I think we have the wrong house,” Ali said the man with the gun told the other before they both left through a basement door that connects to the complex’s underground parking garage.
The men must have been from the complex to have known of the basement exit, Ali told the detective.
Ali, who has diabetes, describes passing out twice while on the 911 call, due in part to low blood sugar, and awoke to someone shaking her.
“I should have defended Cynara,” Ali, in tears, told the detective towards the end of the interview, which concluded at 12:36 a.m. “I did not hurt my baby.”
In her testimony, Louhikari answered yes to each of Lockyer’s suggestions that Ali appeared haggard, exhausted, dishevelled, upset, tearful and anxious about Cynara’s health.
Lockyer then introduced the Ali family’s phone records — obtained in the police investigation into Cynara’s death — which backed up details Ali gave the detective, almost down to the minute, of things that happened leading up to Cynara’s death.
Also confirmed was the fact police made inquiries about 118 Burrows Hall Boulevard, a house that sometimes got mail for the Ali family, and vice versa. (The Alis’ address was unit 118 at the Burrows Hall Boulevard complex.)
At the first trial, an eyewitness testified to seeing two men, looking similar to a description of the intruders given by Ali, in the underground parking garage around the time of the 911 call.
At Ali’s successful appeal, Lockyer argued her jury had been “straitjacketed” into an all-or-nothing decision that wrongly resulted in her conviction and automatic life sentence.
Not put to the jury at her first trial were other possible options to consider, including that Ali could have done nothing wrong but panicked and made up the intruder story.
That fact, along with other problems in Justice Todd Ducharme’s instructions to the jury, was enough reason to set aside her conviction, the Court of Appeal ruled.
Ali’s trial continues on Oct. 31.""
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SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/47049136857587929
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices.
Lawyer Radha Natarajan;
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-1234880143/
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