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A prosecutor who compared an accused murderer to an “animal” and mocked his defence strategy in her opening address has been blamed for tainting a jury in Hamilton, Ont., and forcing a judge to declare a mistrial even before the first witness was called.

Assistant Crown Attorney Kim Rogers went so far as to compare the murder case against Haiden Suarez-Noa to the 1984 movie Impulse, in which rural townsfolk behave in bizarrely erotic ways after toxic waste leaks into the water supply, indulging “their base or most feral instincts,” as she put it.

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“Imagine a society in which anyone could act upon his first instincts,” Rogers told the jury after recommending the film. “That ladies and gentlemen, is what this trial is about: the difference between reasonable human beings and animals.”

The remarks, about the stabbing death of Suarez-Noa’s common-law partner, Tania Cowell, were so inflammatory the trial was effectively over by the first lunch break, and is now expected to resume with a new jury in November.