Judge acquits vulnerable man of murder due to 'oppressive' Winnipeg police interrogation

A man described as a vulnerable person with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder was acquitted of second-degree murder last month, after a Winnipeg judge found his police statement was made up of details he fabricated under pressure — as two detectives took turns screaming at him "at the top of their lungs" — and barred it from being used as evidence in his trial.

Jonathan Michael Gladue, 25, was one of three people charged with second-degree murder in the stabbing death of George Nickolas Demos, 50, who was found unresponsive in a Winnipeg back lane in August 2023.

One of Gladue's co-accused, who was 17 at the time of the killing and can't be identified, has admitted to fatally stabbing Demos and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He previously told court he stabbed Demos at the direction of their third co-accused — Nehemiah Fehr, who has since died — after Fehr said Demos had a backpack that belonged to him as the three were out walking the night of the murder.

Crown attorney Colin Soul gave brief closing arguments in the trial on March 28, immediately after Court of King's Bench Justice Herbert Rempel ruled Gladue's statement was not admissible because it wasn't given voluntarily — saying without that evidence, there was not much left to support prosecution.

"The evidence that you are left with … is him being seen with a group of individuals after Mr. Demos's demise while holding a backpack. That is the entirety of the Crown's evidence to support conviction. I'll leave my comments at that," Soul said, after which Rempel acquitted Gladue and released him.

During Gladue's trial, which began March 24, court was shown surveillance video from near the scene where Demos was killed showing two groups coming across each other before a person the youth co-accused agreed was himself is seen pulling out the knife before going off camera, which is when court heard Demos was stabbed.

Gladue is seen standing nearby in the video, not participating in what's happening, before the group takes off running as he is seen holding the backpack taken from Demos.

Lawyer calls police tactics 'egregious'

Prosecutors argued Gladue used "tactics" in his police interview like "repeatedly qualifying his answers with phrases like 'I assume' or 'I suppose'" in "an effort to deflect and mislead" police about his involvement, Rempel said in a written decision released Thursday on the admissibility of Gladue's statement.

But the judge said he was satisfied what the detectives "considered deflection or distraction" was actually "a genuine effort by Mr. Gladue to try to please the detectives and offer details that did not come from his active memory but rather from his imagination."

"The detectives should have had second thoughts before they engaged in a tag-team screaming match, without at minimum taking a break to allow the accused to gather his thoughts," Rempel wrote, adding he was satisfied Gladue's statement was given under "oppressive circumstances."

Rempel described Gladue's police interrogation as a scenario where detectives used "the maximum amount of psychological pressure and intimidation they could think of, including literally screaming at the accused at the top of their lungs while making aggressive gestures."

He said he found police "chose to believe that the accused was intentionally lying to them and they ignored any possible benign explanations for [his] mischaracterization of the evidence, such as his extreme intoxication at the time, fatigue or a cognitive deficit arising from his FASD."

Defence lawyer Chelsea Suderman noted that at one point during the police interview, detectives told Gladue not to "overthink this," and accused him of "trying to stay one step ahead of us" — to which he replied he was "two steps behind," then said "from the look of the clips, I guess, and from knowing [Fehr], I would assume [it was a] robbery."

One of the detectives then thanked him "for finally admitting what we have been trying to feed you for the last five hours: that you were involved in this robbery, even though you have said throughout that you weren't," Suderman told court.

She called Gladue's statement to detectives "the most egregious statement I have ever seen when dealing with police interrogation tactics," noting people with his "cognitive deficits are more prone to filling in the blanks and to being suggestible."

"We are unfortunately a jurisdiction that very often and very recently has overturned convictions for life sentences based on false confessions," Suderman said, adding that if Gladue's statement was allowed as evidence as the result of detectives' "tunnel vision," it could "very well lead to a wrongful conviction and bring the entire administration of justice into disrepute, and the entire system into disrepute."

"Because realistically, there's no details that Mr. Gladue provides … that are true, that are corroborated with the external evidence that we have, with the videos."