THUNDER BAY — The Ontario Court of Appeal has upheld the conviction of the man found guilty of the stabbing deaths of Thunder Bay residents Wilfred Pott and Anne Chuchmuch.
Benjamin Ronald Marki lived with the common law couple in their County Park home for several years, and had come to refer to them as his mom and dad.
But in December 2015, two days after Christmas, he stabbed them to death, then doused their Brant Street home with gasoline and set it on fire.
In 2018, the 42-year-old Marki was convicted on two counts of second-degree murder, arson and committing an indignity to a human body.
He was sentenced to life in prison with no parole eligibility for 20 years.
A Gladue Report and pre-sentence report highlighted Marki's upbringing including abuse, neglect and being introduced to drugs and alcohol at the age of nine.
He also had an extensive criminal record, marked by escalation, and was considered a high risk to reoffend.
Justice Terrence Platana, describing the murders as "brutal," said Marki was morally culpable in that he attempted to cover up the crime by setting fire to the house and to one of his victims, and that he showed little remorse for his actions.
The issues raised in the appeal of the conviction, which was heard last month by video conference, included:
- whether the trial judge made a mistake with the way he instructed the jury to consider Marki's statements to a firefighter, a police officer and a friend of Pott, in which he denied responsibility for the crimes
- whether the trial judge made a mistake when he instructed the jury that it should not conclude solely because Marki did not testify and that his lawyer called no evidence that there had been an acknowledgment of guilt
With regard to the first issue the Court of Appeal found that the trial judge gave the jury "a good roadmap" for assessing Marki's statements to witnesses, adding that it was "the model instruction on out-of-court statements by an accused."
Concerning the second issue, the court said "There was no risk, in the circumstances of this case, that the jury would have treated the appellant's failure to testify as evidence of his guilt."
It went on to say that, on the whole, the trial judge's instructions "tied the presumption of innocence to the burden of proof in a manner that spoke almost directly to the irrelevance" of Marki's failure to testify.
The appeal court's dismissal of the appeal was released last week.
