The witness was alone in the police interrogation room. Confused and afraid, she began talking to herself in an anxious whisper.

“Oh God, help me . . . I’m getting scared,” Sasha Allison said, a camera capturing her shift in her chair. “Oh my God, I don’t even know who he is talking about.”

It was June 14, 2010. Peel Region Police Det. Thomas Doherty had left the room after a forceful but deceptively calm line of questioning. “Be the good person that you are,” he urged her during the interview. “It’s time to come clean, Sasha.”

It had been over three years since the November 2006 birthday party when Allison, waiting inside her car, saw two men walk through the parking lot outside Malibu Marie’s nightclub in Brampton and open fire, killing partygoer Mervyn “Mikey” Spence.

Allison, who’d had the best view of the shooting, was the strongest witness. She had not recognized the two men she saw flee the scene after shooting Spence. In an interview with Doherty one year before, she could not identify the shooters, though she ruled out some of the party’s attendees, including the birthday boy and party organizer, Eric Morgan.

This time, using interrogation tactics Superior Court Justice Fletcher Dawson later called “leading and suggestive” — and said showed the detective “had an agenda”— Doherty pressured Allison to say “Action,” Morgan’s nickname.

With that, Morgan’s life forever changed, prompting an investigation in which police conducted “abusive” and “threatening” interviews to build their case, according to Dawson.

Morgan would face two trials, spend three and a half years behind bars, and turn down a deal offering a one-day sentence for a guilty plea to manslaughter because he would not admit to a crime he didn’t commit. He would lose his small business, his relationship to his young daughter, his trust in other people.

Using pressure that included threats of criminal charges, police not only “manufactured” incriminating evidence, as Dawson wrote, but also made witnesses back away from statements supporting Morgan’s innocence.

Though Allison said she didn’t know the shooter’s identity, Doherty warned her anyone caught “holding back” could be charged with the crime of accessory after the fact. He then told her information about their suspect — she knew him, saw him in the club, knew his nickname.

Morgan’s strongest alibi witness — once “100 per cent” sure Morgan was inside the club during the outside shooting — became “psychologically broken down” after an eight-hour “relentless onslaught” that ultimately made him say he was no longer certain of Morgan’s whereabouts, Dawson wrote.

“His will was overborne by persistent threats that he would be charged with serious criminal offences if he did not change his position,” Dawson wrote “and he finally capitulated.”

Some of the interviews more closely resembled the aggressive interrogation of an accused, rather than “an objective effort to gather information and preserve evidence,” the judge wrote.

Indeed, the officers’ forceful questioning tactics — commonly known in North America as the Reid technique of police interrogation — are typically used on suspects to produce confessions or assess guilt, not on innocent witnesses providing information.

“The public should be offended by this,” said lawyer James Fleming, who represented Morgan alongside David Shulman. “This could happen to anybody, and it does happen.”

The day after Allison’s interview, Morgan was charged with second-degree murder. No physical evidence linked him to the crime — no DNA, no fingerprints, no fibres, no shell casings from the gun. No motive was ever presented by the Crown. The charge was based on the testimony of two eyewitnesses, including Allison.

IT HAS BEEN nearly a year since Justice Dawson issued a rare directive to the jury at Morgan’s second murder trial, ending the accused man’s ordeal.

“There’s really only one verdict in this case,” the judge told them. “Not really only, there is only one verdict in this case, and that’s not guilty of second-degree murder. Just not guilty.”

For Morgan, the acquittal was hard-won, and it came only after Allison recanted her identification of Morgan on the stand at his first trial, prompting a hung jury, and after his defence team, Fleming and Shulman, uncovered the extent of the problematic police conduct in transcripts and videos of the interviews.

Now a free man struggling to piece back together his life, Morgan filed a $25 million lawsuit against the Peel Police Services Board, the former police chief, and five police officers, including Doherty, who led the investigation.

A statement of defence has not yet been filed. Peel police declined to answer questions asked by the Star, including whether the force is investigating the officers’ conduct, or if changes have been made as a result of the case.

“We would never provide a comment to the media for any matter that is the subject of an alleged civil suit,” said Sgt. David Kennedy, spokesperson for the force, in an email.

Morgan has also filed a complaint to the Office of the Independent Police Review Director (OIPRD), the police watchdog that probes complaints not involving death or injury, alleging police used “highly coercive interrogation techniques” to manufacture a case against him. An investigation is underway.

Shulman points to what he calls the “commendable and laudable” fact that the Peel force’s homicide solvency rate is consistently higher than the national average, an achievement regularly highlighted in the Peel Police Annual Performance Report.

But he questions whether some of the objectionable action taken by the police was caused by pressure to solve Spence murder; according to a 2009 statement to the Toronto Sun by the head of Peel Homicide, the homicide was the only 2006 case remaining to solve.

During an interview with eyewitness Devon Garven one day after the Spence murder, one Peel detective told him: “We’re not Toronto. We don’t just let things go . . . okay, uh, we solve homicides.”

“Rather than seek the truth,” Morgan writes of the police in the OIPRD complaint, “they merely sought a conviction.”

MORGAN’S STORY BEGINS on Nov. 3, 2006. The small auto repair business owner also ran a party promotion company. He drew a large crowd to his event at Malibu Marie’s to celebrate his 39th birthday.

He hired DJs, security guards and a videographer, and sold tickets at the door. At about 3:40 a.m., one of Morgan’s friends sang “Happy Birthday” onstage, and soon after cake was served.

At about 4 a.m., as the night was winding down, Mervyn “Mikey” Spence, an acquaintance of Morgan, was approached in a nearby parking lot by at least two men and shot and killed.

Police immediately launched an investigation. In the following months they interviewed witnesses, including Morgan, who was brought in as a witness for questioning four times over the next two years.

Police made little progress until 2009, when a group of men present at the party were charged in connection to the murder, two with first-degree murder, three with accessory after the fact.

A possible motive police had for their arrests was bad blood between Spence, the victim, and the group of men, with whom he had a previous run-in at another club a few years before. Two of the men in the group — whom the Star is not naming, due to safety concerns for Morgan — had been giving Spence evil looks at the birthday party, according to a friend of Spence.

A preliminary inquiry against the men charged with murder was scheduled for June 2010. A few days before, police called bystander witness Elaine Morrison in preparation for the inquiry.

What she told police triggered a re-investigation into the murder, focusing on Morgan.

Right after the murder, Morrison said she saw one man who may have been a shooter running from the scene and recalled he was wearing sunglasses. This time, she provided additional information that she had seen the same man inside the club before the shooting.

Realizing Morrison might be able to identify the man in video captured inside the club by the hired videographer, police asked Morrison to watch some tape. A few minutes in, a woman can be seen saying “happy birthday” to Morgan, who is wearing sunglasses. Morrison heard this, then asked the police officer watching with her: “Didn’t she just say happy birthday to him? Did you hear that?”

Allison, who is Morrison’s best friend, would later tell police there was a rumour in the community “the birthday boy did it” — something that may have started because one of the men charged in the murder was also celebrating his birthday the same night. Morrison was unaware Morgan was not the only “birthday boy” that evening.

Only after confirming that the woman in the video said “happy birthday” to Morgan, Morrison told police he was the man wearing sunglasses whom she saw outside the club after the shooting.

She then acknowledged “he looks lighter than I remember.” In her previous statement to police, she described the shooter as a “very dark skinned” black man. It was later revealed that in her 2006 interview with police, Morrison had picked out a still image of a man who resembled the shooter, who was significantly taller and weighed roughly 150 pounds, more than Morgan.

After re-interviewing Morrison, police called in Allison.

In her statement to police, she has described a shooter as being “6-foot-1 to 6-foot-2 in height, weighing at least 200 pounds and being dark-skinned. Morgan is 5-foot-8, weighs 120 pounds and has light skin for a Jamaican man.

Doherty informed Allison there had been a development in the case and a witness, who “they believed” had identified a shooter. During the five-hour interview, Doherty told Allison she could get into “trouble” as an “accessory after the fact” if she did not assist the police and provide an identification of their suspect.

“I don’t want you going down that road for yourself. You’ve got too much on the go and you’re an entrepreneur . . . You’ve got two young daughters to look after.”

To help Allison provide a name, the officer gave clues, including that she knew the man personally, had seen him inside the club, knew him by name or nickname.

When left alone in the room, Allison spoke to herself under her breath: “This is tiring. I’m getting scared. Where’s my kids? . . . Oh. Who’s he talking about. I don’t know.”

The comments Allison made while alone in the room were not included in the official transcription provided to the court.

When Doherty re-entered and Allison was pushed to say a name, she ultimately said “Action,” but with an upward inflection that made it sound like a question.

In the interview, Doherty “skillfully used a number of techniques to shore up Allison’s somewhat shaky initial identification of Morgan,” Dawson wrote. Describing Doherty’s interrogation as “hypnotic,” Dawson said the interview “must be seen to be appreciated . . . It is very difficult to describe these subtle influences.”

“(Doherty’s) objective was to develop support for Elaine Morrison’s identification of Morgan if there was any way to do so, as opposed to fairly and accurately documenting Allison’s ability to identify a perpetrator,” Dawson wrote.

Morgan was charged with second-degree murder on June 15, 2010. His arrest set off a string of changes to the other charges in the murder: the charges against the two men were dropped due to the lack of a reasonable prospect of conviction. Another man in the group was re-arrested and charged with second-degree murder, but that charge was soon dropped because there was no evidence identifying him as a perpetrator.

ONE DAY AFTER his arrest, Morgan was interviewed by police in jail. He offered to take a polygraph test and provided the names of seven people he believed could corroborate he was inside the club at the time of the shooting.

When brought in for questioning, police applied pressure to the alibi witnesses who were certain, or felt strongly, Morgan was in the club at the time of the shooting. Some were told they were lying or holding back and “threatened” with charges of obstruction of justice or being an accessory after the fact to murder.

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The judge was especially troubled by an eight-hour interview with alibi witness Brian Cox, a close friend of Morgan. Cox originally said he was “100 per cent” sure Morgan was inside the club with him when someone yelled the news about the shooting outside, a position he held for six hours.

But police told Cox he was “blatantly lying” to them, he was providing a “false alibi” and there would soon be a development that would “put you in a very bad spot.” Cox, who was enrolled in a paralegal training course, was told his career was in jeopardy, because if he was charged he couldn’t practise. (One of the detectives told Cox his “little paralegal school isn’t really helping you out too much right now. . . ”).

“Brian, if you don’t tell me the truth, you are gonna be arrested and charged with accessory after the fact to murder and you’re gonna go to jail today,” said one of the officers.

Eventually, Cox broke down and said Action was not with Morgan inside the club when he first heard about the shooting.

“You know what, you got me all confused and you know what, that’s your job and you’re doing a very good job of it.” Later, he says: “Just charge me . . . I don’t know what to do.”

Upon viewing the interview, Dawson ruled the change in Cox’s story was “the direct result of threatening and oppressive police conduct.”

“I infer (it) was calculated to unfairly undermine the strongest witness in support of Eric Morgan’s alibi,” Dawson wrote.

“The police threat involved a quid pro quo: tell us what we want to hear and you will not be charged. Stick to your support for Morgan's alibi and you will be arrested and held in custody for a bail hearing.”

Chris Murray, one of the DJs at the party, was another witness who believed Morgan was inside during the shooting. Like Cox, Murray was threatened with charges, Det. Derek Rice telling him it was “troubling” he was saying Morgan was in the club during the shooting.

“We know he wasn’t in the club. He was miles away,” Rice said.

Dawson ruled Murray was subjected to “improper threats and overly aggressive and abusive tactics by the police.”

“As I watched the video I could not help but think that if a defence lawyer treated a prosecution witness the way Det. Rice treated Murray, they would be charged with attempting to obstruct justice,” Dawson wrote.

MORGAN’S FIRST TRIAL began in February 2012.

Allison, a Crown witness, took the stand and revealed she was just “guessing” or “concluding” Morgan was the shooter during the interview with police, based on the information she was getting from Doherty.

Cox, called as a Crown witness, also recanted his statement to the police, saying he only said Morgan was not with him at the time because police suggested he was looking at jail time. Police didn’t want to believe him, Cox testified — “they didn’t want to hear of it, they dismissed it as an outright lie and an alibi.”

“I come to court to tell the truth because I’m not afraid,” Cox said.

By the end of the trial, a main question for the jury was identification of the shooter. After five days of deliberation, they could not reach a verdict and a mistrial was declared.

In June 2013, before a second trial began, defence lawyers Shulman and Fleming filed an application to have the murder charged stayed considering police conduct in the witness interviews.

In June, as that application was being argued and the police interrogation tactics were being examined, the Crown offered Morgan a deal: if he pleaded guilty to manslaughter, the Crown would ask for a one-day prison sentence.

He took a few days to decide, drawing up a “pro and con” chart to help him. If he took it, he would be a free man within days. If he didn’t, his case would continue to trial, where there was a chance he would be found guilty and face 10-25 years in prison.

“I have to make the right decision possible for my (future),” he wrote under a stick figure drawing of himself. “I miss the outside world so much.”

In what he said was “the most difficult decision I’ve ever made,” Morgan deciding he could not plead guilty — “not even to a one day sentence.”

“You are asking me to say ‘I am a murderer …’ But that is a lie,” Morgan wrote in a letter addressed to Dawson and the Crown.

A few months later, Morgan’s second trial began. Once again, Allison took the stand and stated Morgan was not one of the shooters. Morrison — Allison’s friend, who identified Morgan as the “birthday boy” — testified she was not certain Morgan was a shooter.

Crown attorneys requested a day to reassess their reasonable prospect of conviction. Two days later, they closed the case and invited the jury to acquit Morgan, an instruction also given by Dawson.

On Nov. 22, 2013, Morgan was a free man.

A BRAMPTON BASEMENT apartment is now where Morgan spends most of his time.

After his release, friends and family expected Morgan, now 47, to bounce back to his old self, that fun, social guy he was before the arrest.

“They don’t understand,” he said in a recent interview. “I used to be a happy guy . . . I’d just wake up every day just being happy. Now, nothing makes me happy, nothing makes me excited, there’s just no feelings there.”

Morgan has difficulty sleeping, dislikes going out and prefers being alone. He says he could stay in this apartment for months without interacting with anyone if he didn’t have to, a stark change from the guy who once ran two small businesses.

He is trying to re-establish not just the business relationships he once had, but the personal ones. Most painfully, Morgan says the bond he once shared with young daughter, Edyn, had deteriorated.

Not wanting her to know he was in jail for murder, Morgan and Edyn’s mother decided not to tell the young girl, now 10, where he was.

When Morgan spoke to her on the phone from jail, he told her was in Jamaica, on vacation and visiting his adult son Rasheen.

When she started noticing the vacation was getting long, he began telling her he was working. He eventually stopped calling after it became clear Edyn was happier when she was able to forget about him.

The distance has taken a toll.

“It’s sad, knowing that the relationship that I used to have with my daughter . . . I’m trying to get that emotional bond that I used to have with her, I try very hard just to feel that love . . . the feeling that I used to have towards anything, anyone, that feeling is just not there anymore.”

In advance of this story and a CBC documentary on his case, airing Friday night on The Fifth Estate, he has had to tell his daughter about his time in jail. He hopes she will understand, be able to accept what happened and move forward.

He wants it for himself, too.

“It’s a long procedure, but I hope I will get there.”