CANADA
Nunatsiaq Online
DAVID MURPHY
Defence lawyer Malcolm Kempt says if he needed to write a textbook about witness collusion, he would focus on the Eric Dejaeger trial.
In what might be a foreshadowing of his final arguments in the trial, Kempt said there is an “outright certainty” that complainants fixed their stories before they testified at the Belgian ex-priest’s trial at the Nunavut Court of Justice in Iqaluit.
Dejaeger’s lawyer made the comments in court March 20 in response to a Crown application that seeks to allow similar fact evidence in the trial.
Similar fact evidence uses each complainant’s testimony to corroborate testimony made by other complainants.
Dejaeger faces 68 charges related to his time as a priest in Igloolik from 1978 to 1982, most of them sex-related crimes against children.
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