Jury selection begins in case of alleged Winnipeg serial killer

Jury selection is scheduled to happen Thursday in the case of a man accused of killing four women in Winnipeg.

Jeremy Skibicki, 37, is charged with four counts of first-degree murder in the 2022 deaths of three First Nations women — Morgan Harris, 39, Marcedes Myran, 26, and Rebecca Contois, 24 — and a fourth unidentified woman, who has been given the name Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, or Buffalo Woman, by community members.

Police have said they believe Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe was Indigenous and in her mid-20s, but the location of her remains is unknown.

Roughly two years ago, in mid-May, partial human remains later identified as belonging to Contois were discovered in a garbage bin near a Winnipeg apartment building. The following month, police recovered more of her remains from the Brady Road landfill in south Winnipeg.

Police said their investigation determined the three other women had been killed between March and May 2022 — before Contois died. Myran’s and Harris’s remains are believed to be in the Prairie Green landfill north of Winnipeg, police have said.

Skibicki has pleaded not guilty to all four charges against him.

Jury selection is scheduled to begin in his case on Thursday morning, though several cases are expected to also have their juries picked the same day.

How does jury selection work?

Michael Spratt, a criminal law specialist and partner at the Ottawa law firm AGP LLP who is not involved in the Skibicki trial, said the jury selection process in Canada is far different from what we see happening in the United States.

In the U.S., lawyers might hire jury consultants, search through potential jurors’ social media histories for evidence of bias or grill them about their beliefs — things that don’t happen here, he said.

“I think that there is a tendency in the media and the public to think that, you know, the defence lawyers or Crown prosecutors can skew a case based on who they pick as a juror. And that’s far from the truth,” said Spratt.

At most, a judge may ask a potential juror if they feel they can be unbiased in the case, either because of media coverage or personal prejudices, and possibly dismiss them because of those answers.

But lawyers in Canada are no longer allowed to make what are known as “peremptory challenges” — objecting to a proposed juror without stating a reason — after changes in 2019, following public outrage over the 2018 trial of Gerald Stanley.

Stanley, a white Saskatchewan farmer, was acquitted of second-degree murder in the shooting death of 22-year-old Indigenous man Colten Boushie. During the jury selection process for his trial, all visibly Indigenous candidates were challenged and excluded by Stanley’s defence team through peremptory challenges.

While lawyers are still allowed to use what’s known as a “challenge for cause” — which allows them to have potential jurors asked “a very limited question about any bias or prejudice that they may have” — only a judge can now ultimately decide to dismiss someone, Spratt said.

“So the ability to exclude a juror is very limited. The information that we have about jurors is very limited and that is, you know, a pretty significant change from what we’ve historically had in Canada,” he said.

The process of selecting jurors also often begins with a pool of hundreds of people that then gets whittled down to the 12 who will decide the case, in part because many people can’t afford to take time off work — especially for longer trials, which often take weeks to wrap up, he said.

Skibicki’s trial is scheduled to begin next Monday and continue until June.