final submissions

Final submissions today, and there are huge questions hanging over the Crown’s case. Bear in mind that the players are supposed to be the victims here: Frost was in a position of trust over them. The girls are presumed to be participants in consensual sex.

Yet the one player we watched on Thursday was testifying for the defence, not the Crown. The gist of his story? That Frost, though deeply involved in his players’ lives, had nothing to do with group sex in which these young men appeared to be regularly engaged from the time they were, oh, 16 years old, and living in Deseronto, Ont., while playing for Frost’s team, the Quinte Hawks. There was a discernible sense of incredulity in the room toward this testimony. If Frost was not engaged in group sex involving with the players, a cynic might have thought, he was the only one within five miles who can say so.

The Crown was able to convey the sense that Frost’s former players are protecting him for some reason. He was clearly a strong presence in their careers and personal lives, at times driving wedges between them and their families. He even wrote them a kind of manifesto, which our witness last Thursday claimed he filed away and forgot about.

Still, the “reasonable doubt” hurdle looks awfully high. When your victims are testifying for the defence …

P.S. I hope to be a little more expansive in my own submissions today. I’m working off my lap-top keyboard, thanks to a high-speed internet “stick” supplied by the folks at Rogers. Wireless reception is a bit spotty in the court, but it should be a vast improvement over my BlackBerry.

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Sorry for the delay everyone. Turns out reception in the court isn’t good enough to support computer transmission. Here’s what’s happened so far:

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10:40 a.m. — Under way at last, with a surprise final witness for the defence: Dr. Hubert Manning. This is the long-awaited “third-testicle evidence.” It turns out Dr. Manning is Frost’s GP. Recall, this was raised by the defence as potentially exculpatory evidence, as one of the women who testified to participating in group sex with Frost and his players did not recall seeing it.