Three people who supplied ammunition to the gunman who killed 22 Nova Scotians two years ago have received criminal charges.
Lawyers for all three – Lisa Banfield, James Banfield and Brian Brewster – appeared in Nova Scotia provincial courts Tuesday morning to complete the process.
All three had been charged with weapons offenses and all three chose to deal with their charges through restorative justice, meaning they did not face trial and had no criminal records.
Lisa Banfield was the gunman’s longtime partner. James Banfield is his brother. Brian Brewster is her brother-in-law.
Lisa Banfield asked the two men to use their firearms certificates to buy bullets. The gunman was not legally allowed to have guns or bullets.
James Lockyer is the lawyer for Lisa Banfield, the partner of the mass shooter who killed 22 people in April 2020 in Nova Scotia. (CBC)
Police said when the trio were charged that none of them knew what the ammunition was supposed to be used for.
“It’s a huge relief that it’s over, for her,” Lisa Banfield’s lawyer, James Lockyer, said in court Tuesday. “For me too.”
But Lockyer said he still has misgivings.
“I said I’ve always been bothered by the fact that the RCMP charged Lisa,” Lockyer said.
Tom Singleton, who represented Brian Brewster, also has questions about the charges.
“I have serious misgivings about the fact that the charges were laid in the first place and what kind of investigation was conducted by the RCMP that actually warranted the laying of the charge,” Singleton said after court.
While Singleton said Brewster realizes that going the restorative justice route is unlikely to get him the answers he wants, avoiding the stress of a trial was worth it for his client.
During the restorative justice process, Singleton said Brewster and his wife had what he described as fairly informal meetings with counselors from the restorative justice program.
James Banfield and his lawyer initially had doubts about the process because they were concerned that representatives of 21 of the families would become directly involved and it would become unwieldy. That didn’t happen.
Neither Brewster nor James Banfield appeared in person in court Tuesday. Lisa Banfield was flanked by her two sisters, as she was when she gave evidence before the inquest last week.
The inquest has heard that people in the United States who played a role in helping gunman Gabriel Wortman obtain three guns from Maine have not been charged, and investigations into the issue of firearms in this side of the border have been closed.
Questions to committee about charges
On cross-examination by Lockyer at the Mass Casualty Commission later Tuesday, RCMP Chief Supt. Darren Campbell said he supported the decision to charge Lisa Banfield, although he said he was not involved in discussions with Crown prosecutors.
Campbell said there were two key issues he considered with other officers: the public interest in bringing the charges and how the charges would be perceived.
He said the optics of charging Lisa Banfield was discussed at a meeting just before the charges were announced on December 4, 2020.
“For example, in terms of victims of domestic violence, victim blaming, I thought that would be an important issue that needed to be addressed,” she said.
“In terms of the families of the victims and what their expectations were or weren’t, how sympathetic or unsympathetic they might be to Lisa Banfield, that was an area I was concerned about.”
RCMP Supt Darren Campbell was the support services officer at the time of the shootings. (CBC)
Another factor Campbell considered, he said, was advancing the ongoing investigation into the supply of firearms used in the crimes.
“Personally, I was optically weighing how that would look. It’s one thing to have a gun. It’s one thing to have bullets. It’s another thing to have guns and bullets together, because then they can become lethal,” he said.
Lockyer asked Campbell, “Did the optics include that it could be perceived as an attempt to deflect attention from the RCMP’s responsibility for what had happened on the night of the murders?”
Campbell replied, “No. That didn’t actually cross my mind, personally.”
Lockyer also questioned whether Campbell was aware of the RCMP’s strategy to avoid giving Lisa Banfield, James Banfield and Brian Brewster their “10B rights” before they were questioned about the ammunition transfer. 10B rights are the right to retain an attorney and avoid self-incrimination.
Campbell said he did not know what precautions or rights they were provided.
Banfield reenacted what she saw and experienced the night of the mass casualty for police investigators in October 2020, just weeks before she was charged.