The daughter of a murder victim says she was relieved after a judge decided that the fate of the man accused of killing her mom and three other women will be decided by a jury, and not by a judge alone.
“This is what we wanted,” Cambria Harris, the daughter of Morgan Harris said in a Facebook post this week, in reaction to Court of King’s Bench Chief Justice Glenn Joyal’s decision that Jeremy Skibicki will have his trial heard by a jury of his peers.
On Nov. 6, Skibicki pled not guilty in a Winnipeg courtroom to four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran, Rebecca Contois, and an unidentified woman being referred to by community members as Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, or Buffalo Woman.
Under the Criminal Code of Canada, murder trials are automatically to be decided by jury, but during pre-trial hearings in November lawyers for Skibicki had requested the trial be heard by a judge, arguing that the section of the Criminal Code that includes that jury requirement for murder trials is unconstitutional, and that an accused murderer should be allowed to choose if they have their verdict decided by judge or jury.
In his decision, which has since been posted on the Court of King’s Bench website, Joyal said lawyers for Skibicki failed to offer any reasonable grounds for their argument, and no evidence that a jury trial would not be fair to the accused.
“In the present case, the accused has in no way provided the court with anything resembling evidence that would suggest that his right to a fair trial is imperiled by his currently scheduled jury trial,” Joyal wrote. “Absent something more, it cannot and should not be assumed that a trial by jury is inherently unfair.”
“Despite the accused’s argument, there does not exist an unfettered right to choose a mode of trial,” Joyal added.
In the decision, Joyal also wrote about what he said is the importance of jury trials in murder cases, saying there is a “long-recognized importance of the jury trial as a social institution that serves both individual and societal interests.”
Police alleged back in December of 2022 that Skibicki killed Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran and dumped both women’s bodies in the Prairie Green Landfill north of Winnipeg near the community of Stony Mountain. They also allege he killed Rebecca Contois, whose partial remains were discovered in Winnipeg’s Brady Road landfill in June of 2022, and Buffalo Woman, the woman police have yet to identify.
The first-degree murder trial for Skibicki is scheduled to begin in April.
