Jurors for the sexual assault trial of Canadian musician Jacob Hoggard on Sunday asked more questions related to consent as deliberations continued for a sixth day.
The jury asked the judge to explain how a complainant’s words and actions could be used to try to raise a reasonable doubt about her evidence related to her mood at the time of the alleged incident without resorting to stereotypes and assumptions about how sexual assault victims should behave.
He asked for examples related to the second complainant, an Ottawa woman who met Hoggard on the Tinder dating app in November 2016 and traveled to see him in Toronto later that month.
The jury also asked for clarity on what a genuine, rather than unwanted, ignorance of a complainant’s lack of consent would represent.
Hoggard, the lead singer of the band Hedley, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of sexual assault causing bodily harm and one of sexual interference, a charge involving sexual touching of a person under the age of 16.
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The Crown alleges that she touched a teenage fan after a Hedley show in April 2016 and then violently raped her at a hotel in the Toronto area that September after she turned 16.
Prosecutors allege that he also violently raped a young woman in Ottawa in late November 2016 in a downtown Toronto hotel.
The two complainants testified that they cried and said no during the meetings, and then bled and bruised.
The defense argues that the palpitations did not occur and that the sexual encounters were consensual.
Canadian musician Jacob Hoggard arrives with his wife Rebekah Asselstine for his trial for sexual assault in Toronto court on Tuesday, May 10, 2022 in Toronto. THE CANADIAN PRESS / Cole Burston
Hoggard testified during the trial that while he has no detailed record of the meetings, he is confident that the complainants consented based on their verbal and nonverbal cues.
In her response to the jury on Sunday, Ontario Superior Court Judge Gillian Roberts said she could not provide specific examples of how to assess the second complainant’s evidence for fear of interfering with her fact-finding process. but it might remind them of some general “legal propositions.” “on the subject.
Roberts first repeated his instructions not to make stereotypical assumptions about how an “ideal victim” should act.
“It is not a mistake to come to a factual conclusion that can logically reflect a stereotype if the factual conclusion is not drawn from a stereotyped inference but is based on evidence,” he said.
She also said jurors could look at what she said and do to the complainant at the time and wonder if it is possible to draw a “reasonable inference that she gave her consent.”
“Remember that a reasonable doubt should not be speculative. There must be something that the complainant did or said from which a reasonable doubt about consent can be drawn,” he said.
On the issue of genuine or deliberate ignorance of the lack of consent, Roberts told jurors that it does not apply.
It is agreed that the issue in each case is whether the Crown has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that the complainant did not consent to sexual activity, she said.
If the jurors accept the plaintiffs’ evidence of what happened in the hotel room, that means they have rejected Hoggard’s evidence and accept that he knew the plaintiffs were not consenting, the judge said.
For the past two days, the jury has asked the court to reproduce the bulk of the evidence presented by the two complainants and Hoggard.
That’s after jurors twice indicated they were locked into “some” of the charges.
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on June 5, 2022.