To be fair, government lawyer David Feliciant's cross-examination of Dave Brown was interrupted and then cut short, with Mr. Brown so ill yesterday he twice had to excuse himself, hand over his mouth, and race from the courtroom to the loo.
And Mr. Feliciant is, in any case, merely the poor sap who is here carrying the can for - er, representing - the Ontario government and the Ontario Provincial Police, the bodies Mr. Brown and his family are suing for $7-million, alleging in effect dereliction of duty in the native occupation that began in February, 2006, in the pretty little town of Caledonia, Ont., south of here.
Mr. Brown, his wife, Dana Chatwell, and their teenage son, Dax, live to this day in the home that was once their pride and joy and is now an albatross. The house is bordered on two sides by the former Douglas Creek Estates, or DCE, the development that was under construction when protesters from the nearby Six Nations reserve seized it as part of a long-standing land claim.
The natives remain there unmolested, compliments of Queen's Park, which in July, 2006, bought out the developer for $12-million. Mr. Brown's house does not, shall we say, command a comparable ready-made buyer, let alone one with the everlasting pockets of the taxpayer.
But back to Mr. Feliciant: Perhaps today, when, Mr. Brown's stomach willing, the trial is expected to resume, the lawyer will be brilliant. But his was not a rip-roaring start.
The first line of the first document he introduced - what police call logs - bore the wrong date.
Mr. Feliciant read it aloud quite clearly: At 5:08 p.m. on April 19, 2006, the OPP noted "a call from Dave Brown. The demonstrators made him get out of his car yesterday and the car was searched." A few minutes later, allegedly, Mr. Brown called back, "venting." The log noted he "lives on Argyle Street, behind the barricades."
Problem is, the natives didn't raise the barricades until April 20, the day they repelled OPP officers who had attempted to enforce a court order, and celebrated with the traditional road blockade, tire burning and the like.
Ontario Superior Court Justice Thomas Bielby pointed out the goof.
Mr. Feliciant's first area of cross-examination consisted of him grilling Mr. Brown about the shotgun he says he kept between his knees during the worst nights of the occupation, when the OPP obligingly determined that discretion really was the better part of valour and failed to step in and stop, among other incidents, the natives' burning of a bridge, trashing of a hydro transformer and tossing of a car off an overpass.
"When did it first come to pass that you obtained the shotgun?" Mr. Feliciant asked, which is legalese for, "When did you get the gun?" Mr. Brown replied that it was during the initial four or five days after the barricades went up.
He explained that he got it from his father's house. "Did you tell him?" Mr. Feliciant asked. "No," Mr. Brown said. "Why not?" Mr. Feliciant asked. "I didn't want him to know," Mr. Brown said.
After determining where in the house the shotgun was - locked gun cabinet in his dad's closet - Mr. Feliciant asked, "Who let you in?" Nobody, Mr. Brown explained. "I just walked in." "You just walked in?" Mr. Feliciant asked, as though Mr. Brown had told him he'd ridden in on a one-legged camel. "It's my parents' house," Mr. Brown said.
Many questions later, Mr. Feliciant had Mr. Brown describe in minute detail how he had sat with the shotgun, and then asked him how one puts a shell in. "You open up the chamber and put a shell in," Mr. Brown said.
The lawyer seemed aghast at the notion of Mr. Brown having this shotgun. "There was no law, sir," Mr. Brown said. "I didn't see a cruiser, a badge. ... I was afraid for my wife and my son."
"What did your son say about the shotgun?" Mr. Feliciant pounced.
"He wasn't there, sir," Mr. Brown replied. "We moved him out" during the barricade period, in large measure because it wasn't safe, and because the school bus, like the mail and the fire service and, oh yes, the police, wouldn't go near DCE.
Mr. Brown told the judge earlier this week that one night he'd dozed off with the shotgun and accidentally fired it, blowing a hole in the kitchen ceiling.
"You can still see where it went through," he said yesterday, "above the kitchen table."
Mr. Feliciant suggested "it's quite a fantastic - not in a good way, almost unbelievable - story." At one point, in what he clearly thought was an "aha" moment, he asked Mr. Brown to reconcile his earlier testimony that he'd patched up the hole and his statement yesterday that he'd had a friend patch it up. "I patched drywall in the ceiling," Mr. Brown said. "A friend patched the roof, the shingle."
"What on Earth does the gunshot hole in the ceiling have to do with the roof?" Mr. Feliciant asked.
"The shell went through the shingle," Mr. Brown said. "It went through the ceiling and after a while, there was a leak."
Clearly, the lawyer didn't realize that Mr. Brown's house is, in the kitchen, a one-storey house.