A B.C. Court of Appeal Justice has upheld a Quesnel jury's decision to find two men guilty of attacking the caretaker of a marijuana grow operation.
In March 2012, Bradley Jay Van Dyke and Clarence Marshall Freeman Gill were convicted of three offences after Jeffrey Steinbrunner was hit with an aluminum baseball bat and shot in the stomach and arm with a .22-calibre rifle during a September 2009 confrontation.
Although the defence did not seek a limiting instruction with respect to bad character evidence, they raised the issue on appeal and contended the judge erred by failing to properly summarize the defence theory, and gave an inadequate warning on the use of the unsavoury complainant's evidence.
In a decision issued this week, Appeals Court Justice Harvey Groberman dismissed the appeal.
A limiting instruction on the use of bad character evidence should have been given, he said, but in the context of this case, the error could not have affected the result of the trial. The other grounds of appeal are not made out, he added.
Groberman's account of the case also provided something of a cautionary tale for anyone thinking of becoming a grow-op caretaker.
In summarizing the evidence presented at the trial, Groberman said Steinbrunner first met Van Dyke and Gill in 2005 when he began working for them in their illegal marijuana grow operations. In 2007, one of the operations was robbed and Gill suspected Steinbrunner of being involved.
Gill fired a shot at Steinbrunner, threatened to kill him and told him to leave Quesnel, but Steinbrunner did not have the resources to move, so he remained in the community.
Relations remained strained but Gill's brother allowed Steinbrunner to take up residence in a cabin that housed a grow operation and soon Steinbrunner started to manage it.
Things turned for the worse when, on the afternoon of Sept. 4, 2009, police executed a search warrant on another grow operation that happened to be across the street.
Police removed the plants and equipment but forgot to leave a copy of a warrant on the site and that may have led the operators to believe the items were stolen rather than seized.
The next day, Gill's brother contacted Steinbrunner and asked him to stay at the cabin overnight, because he was concerned that it might be robbed. Steinbrunner was away from Quesnel but did return to the cabin that evening.
When he heard some noise outside, he stuck his head out the front door to investigate and was struck on the mouth.
He retreated into the cabin, and, assuming that someone was attempting to rob the grow operation, reached for an aluminum baseball bat that he kept near the door. The bat, however, was not there.
Gill and Van Dyke entered the cabin - Gill wielding the bat and Van Dyke armed with the rifle.
Gill forced him to lie on a futon, and struck him several times with the bat although Steinbrunner fended of the blows with some success with most landing on his legs and feet.
Steinbrunner eventually freed himself, and he fled the cabin. As he did so, he heard Gill instruct Van Dyke to shoot. Despite being hit in the stomach and arm, Steinbrunner escaped down a driveway and into a field. He eventually got to a house across the street from where he was taken to hospital.
Steinbrunner's injuries included the loss of five or six teeth, a compound fracture to his forearm and a bullet wound in the upper abdomen.
The sentences Gill and Van Dyke received were not included in the decision.
