Donald Musselman was awaiting appeal on ByWard Market murder conviction when he died in prison, lawyers say

'I feel very strongly that the jury got it wrong, that they wrongfully convicted him.'

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Published Oct 20, 2024  •  5 minute read

Lawyers Leo Russomanno and Kim Hyslop maintain that Donald Musselman was wrongly convicted of murder. He died in prison on prison on Oct. 15 at age 24. Photo by Tony Caldwell /Postmedia

Lawyers for Donald Musselman say their faith in the jury trial system has been “shaken” after Musselman, 24, died in prison last week while he was awaiting an appeal.

Defence lawyers Leo Russomanno and Kim Hyslop said they had filed an appeal to Musselman’s second-degree murder conviction and were hoping to win a new trial for their client in the 2019 ByWard Market shooting of Ottawa musician Markland Campbell.

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Musselman was convicted of second-degree murder by a jury last year and, in May, was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 12 years.

He also pleaded guilty to manslaughter last month for killing an inmate at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre in 2021 while he was awaiting his murder trial.

Musselman admitted to killing fellow inmate Zakaria Sheek-Hussein, who was beaten and “stomped” into a coma on Feb. 24, 2021 inside an OCDC day room and died in hospital six months later.

Musselman maintained his innocence throughout his trial for Campbell’s murder, however, and claimed another youth in his group was the one who fired the gun that killed Campbell on the night of June 7, 2019.

That youth was called to testify at Musselman’s trial in November 2023 and claimed on the witness stand that he was the shooter.

The jury was unaware that the teenager was already serving a maximum 10-year sentence for first-degree murder when he testified.

Donald Musselman was found guilty of second-degree murder in the 2019 shooting death of Ottawa musician Markland Campbell. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the 2021 jailhouse killing of Zakaria Sheek-Hussein.

The jury rejected the defence team’s claims of a second shooter and, after eight days of deliberations, found Musselman guilty of Campbell’s murder.

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“I feel very strongly that the jury got it wrong, that they wrongfully convicted him,” said Russomanno in an interview last week following reports of Musselman’s in-custody death at Joyceville Institution.

“I feel very strongly that there were very good grounds for appeal and we were looking forward to arguing that and having the appeal heard. He did maintain his innocence throughout, and the evidence against him was, in my view, weak.

“The entire trial has really shaken whatever confidence I had in the jury system,” Russomanno said.

Russomanno declined to go into detail about the specific grounds for appeal, but suggested there were multiple issues the defence would have raised if the case had proceeded in Ontario’s highest court.

Russomanno said he continues to have “very serious concerns about the way the case unfolded, and I was very much looking forward to having all of this aired out at the Court of Appeal.”

In April, prior to sentencing Musselman, Superior Court Justice Anne London-Weinstein heard an application from the defence that outlined an odd interaction between one of the jurors and the two Ottawa police detectives who investigated Campbell’s murder.

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Musician Markland Campbell died after being shot in the ByWard Market in 2019. Photo by Chris Wiens

Post-verdict, it was revealed that one of the jurors visited the police station days after delivering the verdict and “gifted” Det. Chris Benson and Det. Guy Seguin “with two Christmas cards and challenge coins … (that) expressed support for police.”

One of the coins contained an image of the comic book character The Punisher and featured an inscription: “God will judge our enemies.”

In her ruling, London-Weinstein wrote that the two detectives “quite properly disclosed” the receipt of the juror’s gifts to the Crown, who, in turn, notified Musselman’s defence lawyers.

The defence, Crown and judge all agreed that “a post-verdict inquiry could not be held without infringing on the sanctity of the jury deliberation process … .”

Both detectives testified about the gifts on the court record — long after the jury had been discharged — “with the understanding that this would be done to prepare a record for the appellate (appeal) court to review this matter,” London-Weinstein wrote.

“The parties agreed that Det. Benson and Det. Seguin would testify in order to create a record for appellate review, but that it would be an improper intrusion into the deliberative process of the jury for the court to conduct an inquiry.”

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Musselman’s trial extended over 12 weeks — twice as long as initially scheduled — and featured numerous delays and adjournments over “thorny” issues, the judge wrote.

“This was a very difficult trial. Several unusual and some unexpected issues arose both during the trial and even post-verdict. It has often been said that the only predictable feature of a criminal jury trial is its unpredictability. That was certainly true in this case,” she wrote.

“There’s obviously very little we know about how a jury reaches its conclusions because of the secrecy of jury deliberations,” Russomanno said. “My personal view is that the system failed him. I continue to have concerns and it is unfortunate that those concerns will never be fully aired-out at the Court of Appeal. But it is a matter of (court) record.”

Crown attorneys Matthew Geigen-Miller and Lisa Miles — who has since been appointed a judge — told London-Weinstein to reject the defence arguments of another shooter.

When he was arrested and charged with Campbell’s murder in June 2019, police found the handgun used in the killing in Musselman’s bedroom.

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The Crown also relied on eyewitness testimony, including key testimony from Campbell’s daughter, as evidence that Musselman was the shooter.

Campbell was shot twice in a confrontation with a group of teenagers in the ByWard Market after his daughter called him and reported she had been harassed earlier that night.

Geigen-Miller said it was “an indisputable fact that the jury unanimously rejected extremely significant parts” of both Musselman’s and the teenager’s accounts of the shooting.

“The jury rejected the core elements of their narrative,” the prosecutor told the judge during Musselman’s sentencing hearing.

Russomanno said last week he was “very confident that the grounds for appeal were very good.”

He pointed to the “frailties of eyewitness identification” as a common element in wrongful convictions.

“Our defence would have been maintained that he was not the person who shot Markland Campbell,” Russomanno said.

Corrections Canada has not yet released a cause of death or any further details after confirming Musselman died at the Joyceville prison Oct. 15.

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“As in all cases involving the death of an inmate, the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) will review the circumstances,” the agency said in a news release.

Police and the coroner have since been contacted per CSC policy and Musselman’s cause of death “will be determined by the coroner. CSC does not have any further information to share,” the agency said Friday.

“A person should not be reduced to the bad things they’ve done,” said Russomanno. “He was a human being who had been incarcerated since he was 18. But I saw a human side to Donnie that isn’t shown in the (media) coverage.”

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