ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — It was a complex murder case before the court, involving a police investigation that included 500 officers, members of a biker gang wearing hidden recording devices and serving as informants, and a dead pig in a hockey bag made to look like a human body.
In the end, Allan Potter was convicted and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. On Thursday his lawyers appealed that conviction, arguing it’s unreasonable and not supported by evidence.
Potter, who is serving his sentence in a federal prison and did not personally attend his appeal hearing in St. John’s, filed the appeal days after he was convicted by a jury in March 2019 of first-degree murder in the death of Dale Porter.
Porter, 39, a fisherman, trucker and father of two, was found stabbed almost 20 times in his North River, Conception Bay North, driveway in the early morning hours of June 29, 2014.
Potter and another man, Daniel Leonard, were socializing with Porter and a woman in a nearby bar that night. According to prosecutors, Porter had been disrespectful to the Vikings Motorcycle Club, of which Potter and Leonard were members, and had made an “indecent proposal” to Leonard’s girlfriend. Prosecutors said Potter and Leonard got a cab with Porter back to his home, where he was murdered.
Potter was questioned by police in the days after Porter’s death, but he wasn’t arrested until two years later, after an RCMP “Mr. Big” operation in this province and Ontario. With help from another member of the Vikings, an RCMP officer posed as the operator of a debt collection service and offered Potter a job. Potter agreed to help him and two other undercover Mounties move what they said was a dead body stuffed in a hockey bag from a cornfield to a cemetery. The “body” was really the carcass of a pig.
Potter told the undercover officer he had stabbed Porter, whose DNA had been found on Potter’s hoodie and in the taxi Potter had taken from Porter’s house the night in question.
At trial, Potter testified he had stabbed Porter in self-defence after Porter had turned on Leonard. His lawyers argued there was “not one shred” of evidence to prove otherwise. Potter told the undercover officers he had stabbed Porter, the lawyers argued, out of fear and with the goal of making himself seem tough.
Potter, 56, is appealing his murder conviction on eight grounds; many of them include mistakes he alleges the trial judge made when instructing the jury before sending them into deliberations. The judge’s instructions showed a bias toward the Crown, he is arguing.
He says the judge should have discharged or questioned a juror who disclosed he had worked with the victim’s sister. He also alleges the judge should have excluded statements he made to undercover officers.
Leonard was also charged with Porter’s murder and had been set to go to trial last September, but was acquitted after the Crown announced it was calling no evidence against him. Prosecutors indicated there wasn’t a reasonable chance of conviction, given a judge’s decision a week earlier to exclude from evidence a statement Leonard had given to police when he was arrested.
The judge had excluded the statement on the grounds that police had breached Leonard’s rights and used "subtle inducement and veiled threats" to get him to talk.
The panel of appeal judges will deliver their decision in Potter’s case at a later date.
Tara Bradbury reports on the courts and the justice system in St. John’s.
