LITMIR.BIZ

      A shotgun blast in the middle of the day. Nick Pasowesty, a successful farmer, was murdered on his own land. No one knew who pulled the trigger, but an RCMP investigation found the family weapon that fired the shell and discovered that Pasowesty was highly disliked by his neighbor and had a rather rocky relationship with his third wife, Annie. The Mounties dug deeper and quickly focused on the youngest son, John, a spendthrift seventeen-year-old who had apparently bragged about shooting his dad.

      After a brief interrogation, the boy confessed to the crime. A week later he changed his tune, saying his mother had pulled the trigger. “She told me that I should say that I have killed my old man because I might get out of it somehow because she would get some lawyers for me.”

      That lawyer turned out to be John Diefenbaker and this was his first murder case. He faced an uphill climb – the trial judge was Mr. Justice George E. Taylor, who had been intimidating defence lawyers for over forty years. He preferred prosecution to leniency and Diefenbaker had butted heads with him a number of times in the past.

      John first questioned Annie on the stand, but several lines of inquiry were shot down by the judge. Next Diefenbaker tried to convince the judge that the boy’s first confession was inadmissible because the boy was under stress and had been arrested without being allowed to speak to his family. The judge cut Diefenbaker off and explained that the confession would stand: “I must say that I feel so convinced that I could not hope that any further consideration of the matter would alter the conclusion at which I have arrived.”

      Diefenbaker began to sweat. He had to put doubt in the jury’s mind by implicating the boy’s mother. Unfortunately Diefenbaker had made a serious mistake, he hadn’t subpoenaed the RCMP officer who wrote down the boy’s second confession. Diefenbaker had believed the prosecution would call the officer. Too late, Diefenbaker asked to call his witness up. The judge disallowed the request and rebuked Diefenbaker in front of the whole courtroom. “If you want evidence,” the judge lectured, “it is your duty to get it yourself. Proceed please.”

      Diefenbaker had only one choice left. He put the boy in the witness box. The prosecution carefully and politely tore holes in the boy’s suggestion that his mother was the killer. By the time the prosecution was finished, the boy looked like a cunning murderer.

      “Annie Pasowesty,” Diefenbaker said in his closing arguments, “committed this crime. A schemer, a plotter, she contrived an arrangement where she could kill her husband and throw suspicion upon her son. And worse. Then she induced this boy to confess to the crime, to take that responsibility upon himself and steer all suspicion away from her.” He hoped his words would be enough to put doubt in the minds of the jury.

      The prosecution continued to insist the boy could not be believed. The judge echoed that conclusion.

      Five hours later the jury returned with a verdict of guilty and the judge sentenced John Pasowesty to be hanged at Prince Albert jail on February 21, 1930.

      It was a loss, but Diefenbaker, who disliked capital punishment, had one final ace to play. He had a psychiatrist examine the boy. The conclusion: John Pasowesty had a mental age of eight or nine years.

      With this new information John petitioned the federal cabinet for clemency, and the boy’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

      “I knew I wouldn’t die,” John Pasowesty sobbed as he clutched the telegram from Ottawa. “I don’t know about spending the rest of my life in jail, but I think I’ll like it better than hanging.”

      For Diefenbaker, it was almost a victory.