“He’s a young man who had struggled with life here, and just wants to go home.” Acquaintance of Anguei Pal-Deng, also from South Sudan

It appeared to be a disturbing case of random brutality: inside Dufferin Mall last March, a young man pushed a perfect stranger, 82-year-old Maria Ferreira, down a stairwell, sending her tumbling violently to the ground.

Or so testified three people at the assault trial of Anguei Pal-Deng, a 25-year-old Sudanese man who speaks an African language called Dinka and lives in and out of shelters.

Through a translator in Old City Hall court last month, Pal-Deng denied the allegation, saying he inadvertently made contact with the elderly woman while gesturing for her to pass.

But it was the word of a “culturally challenged and unsophisticated” man against a “sympathetic” elderly woman claiming he pushed her and two independent witnesses backing her up, Ontario Court Judge Melvyn Green wrote in a ruling released last week.

Pal-Deng might well have been found guilty, were it not for closed-circuit television footage that Green said exonerated him.

The video depicts a gesture that “appears like nothing so much as an offer of physical guidance, direction or support,” Green ruled. “. . . There is nothing patently aggressive or menacing about the action.”

The judge continued: “It is of profound concern that justice could so easily have been miscarried but for the good fortune that the very physical exchange at issue was preserved on videotape. Absent the CCTV evidence, the result may have been tragically different.”

The judge made the unusual move of apologizing to Pal-Deng for the months he spent in jail awaiting trial on the matter, saying: “I regret that I could not do more on behalf of this court.”

Pal-Deng spent seven months in jail for an offence that carries a maximum sentence of six months. However, he had a prior conviction for assault, had no community contacts to stay with and was simultaneously facing a separate assault charge to which he later pleaded guilty — all factors that led to him not being granted bail.

Additionally, the trial date was delayed because of complications in locating a Dinka translator. An uncertified court translator ultimately had to be used, though the judge noted no serious communication problems.

Green also had stern words for the Crown prosecution for proceeding with the trial in the face of video he said exonerated the accused. It was of “profound concern,” Green wrote, that Pal-Deng was detained for as long as he was for “offences for which factually exculpatory evidence had long been in the possession of the state.”

Brendan Crawley, spokesperson for the Ministry of the Attorney General, said he could not comment on the specific facts of the case because it is still within the appeal review period.

“However, in general, I can advise that the Crown only proceeds when there is a reasonable prospect of conviction and it is in the public interest to proceed,” Crawley said. “In each case, the Crown carefully examines all aspects of the available evidence and the relevant legal principles in considering whether to pursue the prosecution.”

The assault charge stemmed from a brief interaction between Pal-Deng and Ferreira on the morning of March 6, 2014, in a stairwell in Dufferin Mall.

A split-second after a brief physical interaction when Pal-Deng’s hand made contact with Ferreira’s right side, the woman toppled down the stairs. An ambulance later took her to hospital, but she suffered no serious injuries was released the same day.

In court, Ferreira testified that she began approaching Pal-Deng, who was standing by a wall drinking a Coke, because she wanted to use the handrail he was leaning against.

The woman, who uses a cane, recalls saying “excuse me” a few times, but did not hear Pal-Deng say anything in response. She then testified that he “grabbed my arm and threw me down the stairs.”

Two witnesses testified that they saw Pal-Deng push Ferreira. One woman claimed she first heard a verbal “confrontation” or “argument” between the two. A second woman initially testified that she saw a “push,” then withdrew the word and characterized it as a touch. She later readopted the term “push” after reading from her police statement.

Green noted inconsistencies in the witness accounts, including that neither Ferreira’s testimony nor the video indicated a verbal dispute took place.

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He wrote that one witness’s testimony about where Ferreira landed after the fall was proven false by video evidence. Additionally, based on her location at the time of the physical interaction, that same witness “could not possibly” have had a clear view, Green wrote.

The video also showed that Pal-Deng did not, as both witnesses testified, stand aloofly over Ferreira after her fall, but crouched and physically tended to her.

Green also took note that Ferreira was 82 and used a cane, suffered from diabetes or a related precondition, and had just had two vials of blood drawn at the doctor’s office that morning, requiring that she fast. At the time of the fall she had not eaten for 14 hours.

Though he noted that “a more sinister interpretation” of the interaction is possible, Green said it was a “strained construction” and “is not an inference I draw on repeated viewings of the DVD.”

“Each of the three women, no matter how well intentioned, tried to make narrative sense of the events by working backwards from their consequences,” Green wrote.

“The result is a measure of reconstruction or confabulation or, at minimum, the assignment of aggression or blameworthiness to an ambiguous incident for which the only certainty was its unfortunate result.”

Pal-Deng has since been released from jail. An acquaintance of his from the same area of South Sudan, who has not seen him for several years, said she believes he came to Canada about a decade ago.

The woman, who did not want to be identified, said Pal-Deng has had difficulty becoming accustomed to the way of life in Canada, in part because of his language barrier.

“He’s a young man who had struggled with life here, and just wants to go home,” she told the Star.

Criminal lawyers said the case highlights problems with the reliability of witnesses, many of whom are well meaning but whose accounts can be inaccurate.

“Memories are fallible,” said David Taylor, Pal-Deng’s defence lawyer. “People may read in what they think happened rather than what they actually saw.”

“People are saying thank goodness there’s a video,” said Emma Rhodes, a Toronto criminal lawyer not connected to the case. “The other side of it, I would say, is what do we do for all the cases where there aren’t videos?”