JURORS MUST NOW DECIDE WHETHER DRUG-DEALER FIRED IN SELF-DEFENCE

Ajine Stewart's right to self-defence under Canadian law doesn't
extend to firing a gun to save his drug-dealing business or protect
his fearsome reputation, prosecutor Paul McDermott told a jury yesterday.

"You get to preserve your life, not your business, your income or your
status," Mr. McDermott said in his closing remarks at Mr. Stewart's
second-degree-murder trial.

Now 27, Mr. Stewart is charged in the shooting of 21-year-old Dwayne
Taylor at a crowded downtown Toronto public square on a Caribana
festival weekend in July, 2005.

Mr. Taylor would have turned 25 this Sunday.

Both young men were at the time members of various arms of the Crips
street gang, both made their living as drug dealers and both had
criminal records.

Mr. Stewart has admitted being the figure who in multiple video and
still images is shown firing a .38 calibre Smith & Wesson revolver
twice at Mr. Taylor, the muzzle flashes clearly visible on the tape.

While one bullet hit Mr. Taylor square in the chest and killed him,
the sound of the gunshots caused pandemonium in the jam-packed Dundas
Square, sending revellers running for their lives.

Within seconds, as the cameras show, a square that had been filled
with an estimated 1,000 partiers, not counting hundreds more on the
adjacent sidewalks, was virtually empty but for police.

It was, in fact, Mr. Stewart's very stillness in all that chaos - he
was, former Toronto Constable Keith Lindley testified, the only person
not running away - that first drew police eyes to him.

In an act of bravery that later won him the Toronto force's highest
honour, Constable Lindley single-handedly tackled Mr. Stewart and
subdued him.

Mr. Stewart testified last month on his own behalf, claiming that he
fired because Mr. Taylor had threatened to kill him over an alleged
drug beef and had appeared to be reaching for a weapon.

But in earlier cross-examination by Mr. McDermott, Mr. Stewart also
admitted that when Mr. Taylor allegedly disrespected him in public
early that morning, he couldn't be seen to "bow down to him in front
of his friends," that "I would be opening doors to be picked on" and
that "My career [as a gangster] would have been scattered."

He agreed with the prosecutor that he could have called for help from
any of the dozens of Toronto Police in the square (except it went
against his gangster's code), that he could have just run away (except
it would have damaged his tough-guy bona fides) or that he could have
gone to the square unarmed in the first place (except he had to be
ready for a situation just like the one that happened).

And that, Mr. McDermott said, is precisely why he can't now claim he
shot in self-defence: Mr. Stewart can't graft "a criminal lifestyle
and gang principles" on to the Criminal Code of Canada and expect its
protection.

"That's not the law in Canada," he said.

Mr. Stewart's lawyer, Jeff Milligan, told the jurors that the only
reason his client would have fired in such a public place, so crawling
with police, was that he felt threatened by Mr. Taylor.

"Did Dwayne Taylor have a gun and did he use it or might he have used
it?" he asked, suggesting that though no other weapon or trace of a
weapon was ever found in the square, "is it not conceivable" that
someone else, such as one of Mr. Taylor's friends, "took the gun?"

Mr. Milligan said the real question for the jurors was "Who was more
likely to be the aggressor? Who drew first or may have drawn first?" -
Mr. Taylor with his "hair-trigger temper" and his Grim Reaper tattoo,
or his client, who has "not led an innocent life" but who "may well be
innocent of second-degree murder."

Mr. McDermott, though, put paid to that line of reasoning.

He said that where many times, jurors are told that a criminal trial
is like a puzzle, "In this case, all you've got to do is press the
Play button - and see the murder. That will give you reliable insight
into what happened."

On the video, he said, "You see Ajine Stewart going toward the target,
arm outstretched with a firearm in it, shoot, brace himself ... then
look down and lower the barrel of that gun and shoot and kill Dwayne
Taylor.

"That is not self-defence," Mr. McDermott snorted. "That is
second-degree murder."

He urged the jurors to completely disregard Mr. Stewart's
"far-fetched, manufactured and creative" explanation of why he and Mr.
Taylor might have quarrelled.

According to Mr. Stewart's testimony, months earlier Mr. Taylor had
magnanimously offered to share his drug profits with him, though he
was a virtual stranger, when Mr. Stewart was on bail, his freedom of
movement and ability to sell cocaine allegedly hampered. Mr. Stewart
said he later repaid this alleged act of kindness by stealing most of
Mr. Taylor's customers.

Mr. McDermott was scornful of the notion that Mr. Taylor, "hard core"
by Mr. Stewart's own description, would have just handed over half his
profits to another drug dealer on his own turf.

"It's nonsense," Mr. McDermott said, but Mr. Stewart "needed" the ruse
to back up his later explanation for the clash and shooting.

Mr. Justice David McCombs of Ontario Superior Court is expected to
complete his instructions to the jurors today, at which point they
will begin deliberations.