Final arguments presented in prison-death trial

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This article was published 27/09/2023 (711 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Corrections officer Robert Morden ignored William Ahmo’s repeated pleas that he couldn’t breathe until it was too late, leading to the death of the 45-year-old Headingley Correctional Centre inmate, a judge was told Monday.

“The evidence is overwhelming that Mr. Ahmo was in distress and required urgent medical attention,” Crown attorney Jason Nicol told provincial court Judge Tony Cellitti in a closing argument Monday.

“We don’t need a medical professional to tell us breathing is essential to life,” Nicol said. “If you are not breathing, you will die.”

Ahmo died in hospital Feb. 14, 2021, seven days after he was injured during a prolonged standoff with corrections officers.

Morden, 44, who led the emergency-response team that ultimately took Ahmo down, is on trial charged with criminal negligence causing death and failing to provide necessities of life.

Court has heard evidence Ahmo flew into a violent, destructive rage after he was told a racist joke, resulting in dozens of inmates in his unit being locked in their cells.

Members of the jail’s emergency-response unit fired pepper balls at Ahmo to no avail during a three-hour standoff that ended with a dozen response-unit officers, led by Morden, storming the unit and taking a resistant Ahmo to the ground.

“He struggles, he squirms, but there is really no fight, and he is dominated and controlled literally within one minute,” Nicol said, referencing response-unit video of the takedown provided to court.

The video shows Ahmo being shackled and handcuffed as officers quickly move him to another nearby secured area described in court as the “horseshoe.”

Pinned to the floor and fully restrained, Ahmo tells officers more than a dozen times he can’t breathe. After officers strap him into a restraint chair, Ahmo twice more calls out “I can’t breathe,” prompting Morden to yell, “If you’re talking to us, you can breathe.”

“That mindset is not reasonable,” Nicol said. “How else can someone indicate they are having trouble breathing other than literally saying, ‘I can’t breathe?’ It’s a mindset that directly contributed to Mr. Ahmo’s death.”

Defence lawyer Richard Wolson, pointing to the testimony of Andrew Barbour, a correctional officer who trains members of the emergency-response unit, argued Morden’s comment is commonly repeated to people who have been exposed to pepper spray in order to allay their anxiety.

Morden “had every reason to believe (Ahmo’s) comment he could not breathe was the result of the pepper spray,” Wolson said. “It might have been a whole different scenario if out of the blue someone said they couldn’t breathe.”

Earlier, Nicol urged Cellitti to reject the testimony of Barbour, the Crown’s own witness, arguing he agreed to every suggestion put to him under cross-examination that was favourable to the defence, becoming “an apologist” for Morden.

“Mr. Barbour basically testified that everything Mr. Morden did inside the horseshoe was justified and reasonable,” Nicol said. “There is simply no way that Mr. Barbour’s opinion and (the video evidence) can coexist.”

In the video, three minutes after he is placed in the restraint chair, Ahmo continues to plead he cannot breathe, at which point officers release him and take him to the floor.

Ahmo repeats several times he can’t breathe before becoming unresponsive. Officers confirm he is still breathing and, believing he is sleeping, strap him back into the restraint chair. A nurse checks his chest two minutes later and, finding he has no pulse, calls for a code red.

Ahmo died in hospital seven days later. A pathologist testified he died as the result of a heart attack after he was left struggling to breathe.

Nicol said officers had no training for the restraint chair, which under the circumstances would have compromised Ahmo’s ability to breathe. Nicol said under the jail’s use-of-force policy at the time, the chair was to be used only in cases in which an inmate posed a risk of self-harm.

“There’s clearly no way Mr. Ahmo would self-harm in that condition,” Nicol said.

Wolson argued officers were allowed to use the restraint chair, which was the best way to transport “high-risk” inmates to other areas of the jail, and had the tacit approval of Morden’s command-post superiors, who were monitoring the incident.

“If senior management were concerned about use of the chair, you can be sure they would have said something,” Wolson said. “It was the best way to transport a combative inmate.”

Wolson contested Nicol’s claim Ahmo posed no threat after he was handcuffed and shackled, alleging video evidence showed he continued to resist efforts to restrain him. Wolson said officers would have been on high alert after earlier comments Ahmo made to a crisis negotiator that he was willing to die and that “this was war.”

There was “a belief that there would be a reoccurrence of violent behaviour, because that is the history,” Wolson said.

Cellitti will deliver his verdict at a later date.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca