After five and a half days of deliberation, a jury found Jesse Norman Sweder not guilty Wednesday evening of murdering Peter John Letendre nearly seven years ago.
The outcome left defense lawyers Jim Heller and Jeremy Fung both "elated" and "relieved."
Sweder himself appeared to have shed a tear, Heller said in an interview about an hour after the verdict was announced at the Prince George courthouse, while Sweder's mother burst into tears of relief.
"It's palpable, just the exhalation," Heller said.
"You could just feel it, the
unwinding, the relief."
Sweder had been facing a charge of second degree murder in the death of Letendre, who was found dead in the early morning hours of Dec. 11, 2004 outside Victoria Towers at 20th and Norwood, shot four times in the back with a nine millimetre semiautomatic pistol.
It was the second time Sweder faced trial on the matter after a previous one, which lasted seven weeks, ended in a hung jury in July 2010.
This latest trial lasted about
11 1/2 weeks.
Sweder dug himself a big hole when, in a Fort St. John bar in 2007, he told an undercover police officer posing as a Hells Angel biker, that he killed Letendre. But defence lawyers argued Sweder took credit for the killing simply to gain status and never actually pulled the trigger.
"He obviously got himself into trouble because of immature, punk bravado," Heller said. "And you could just tell, over the time he's had to deal with this and deal with the consequences of that rashness, he's not the same person ...he's really matured in the time that I've represented him."
The killing appeared drug related, and the court heard Sweder was a successful cocaine dealer although he emphasized he stayed away from the VLA and anyone involved in selling or consuming crack cocaine.
Crown prosecution argued Sweder was brought in to pull the trigger as a form of payment to one of the gangs that had been battling at the time for control of the city's illicit drug trade.
The jury also heard from witnesses who testified others also took credit for the murder and who indicated discrepancies between Sweder's physical appearance and how his looks were described by those who put him at the scene.
Sweder maintained he was not only never at the scene of the shooting but was not even in Prince George at the time. And a gun was never found and there was little
additional forensic evidence.
By the end, said Heller, there was simply too much doubt to convict Sweder.
"As I explained to the jury, on any reading the Crown's case couldn't reconcile," Heller said.
"It was like a Rubik's Cube and you could look at it this way and you could look at it that way but it just couldn't perfectly add up. There was always some significant aspect of it missing."
