One of the posters put up by Livingston Jeffers, provided by the Ontario Court of Appeal.
A distraught Toronto man who put up posters associating the name of a city councillor with the word 'murder' clearly had no intention of causing the politician's death, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled on Wednesday.
The court reversed Livingston Jeffers' conviction for mischief and counselling murder, noting that the 60-year-old black immigrant from Montserrat wished only to call attention to the fact that his destitute family had lost its condominium townhouse.
Mr. Jeffers and his family lost their condo in 2007 after they were unable to continue making mortgage payments. They had lived in it since 1986. Some of the posters Mr. Jeffers made bore a photograph of Scarborough Centre Councillor Michael Thompson, who is also black, alongside Mr. Jeffers' phone number and the words: "Murder...Help."
The posters, which were amongst a collection of 10,000 that Mr. Jeffers intended to staple up around the city, also said: "Councillor Thompson. Help black. We black."
Another set of posters made no reference to Mr. Thompson. Instead, they included photographs of the Jeffers family and alleged that they had been defrauded by the condominium corporation that owns the complex. The posters also stated that the Jeffers family "fear for their life."
In their 3-0 ruling today, the appellate judges said that the mischief charge was inappropriate on account of the fact that Mr. Jeffers was merely exercising a right that is common in democratic societies.
"Individuals have long used postering as an effective and inexpensive means of communicative expression – whether to give notice of a lost pet, an upcoming local concert or a person's availability to do home repairs," said Mr. Justice John Laskin, writing on behalf of Madam Justice Eileen Gillese and Madam Justice Andromache Karakatsanis.
"Criminalizing this kind of conduct is not in society's interest," the judges said.
A lawyer who argued the appeal forMr. Jeffers, James Lockyer, said that his client regarded Mr. Thompson the one person who had helped him in the past.
Judge Laskin agreed that it was entirely improbable that Mr. Jeffers would want to see the death of a councillor to whom he was appealing for help.
"More broadly, I agree with counsel for Mr. Jeffers that our society can accommodate the kind of nuisance caused by the appellant," he said. "To convict him of one of the most serious crimes in our criminal law is, on its face, unreasonable."
Judge Laskin noted that Mr. Jeffers tends to employ "colourful" speech, and apparently used the word 'murder' because, in the vernacular, it constitutes a cry for help.
"On their face, they were a cry from a fellow black man to help the Jeffers family, not an exhortation to kill," he said.