Ottawa lawyer John Hale was quick on his feet in Court Room No. 2 on Friday and, as always, had his eye on the ball.

Upset that he wasn’t credited more for time spent in custody, his client, an Ottawa thief who lost his left eye to cancer while at the Innes Road jail removed his ocular prosthetic and threw it at the lawyer, who caught it after a single bounce off the counsel desk.



“That’s the thing about this business, there’s always something new that happens,” said Hale, who joked that it was a “new form of retainer.” Told it was a good catch, he said modestly, “I could see it coming.”

His client, a thief who steals to feed a drug habit, was sentenced Friday to 18 months. He served about 102 days in pre-trial custody and was credited for 153. He thought he deserved more but he was confused about the process.

Jesse Whitlock, 32, is going back to jail. The lawyer gave the fake eyeball to a police guard for fear his client, who has mental-health issues, would flush it down a toilet in protest.

How Whitlock lost his left eye was reported in the Citizen last year. At the time, Whitlock accused doctors at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre of ignoring his vision problems until it was too late to save his eye from an aggressive form of cancer.

A retinal surgeon agreed Whitlock‘s left eye may have been saved if the choroidal melanoma had been identified sooner, but wouldn’t blame other doctors for missing it because the cancer is so rare in patients as young as Whitlock that they wouldn’t have been looking for it.

Whitlock said he complained in February 2013 about seeing flashes in the eye to a doctor at the Innes Road detention centre.

Whitlock, who was in jail at the time for stealing a car and leading police on a chase, says the jail doctor told him it could be caused by dust.

“I was total 3 1/2 months blind with a full-blown, Stage 5 cancer in my eye in jail before I got it removed,” said Whitlock. “They wouldn’t have had to take my eye if they had taken the matter more seriously. They could have just zapped it out. It would have saved my eye,” he told the Citizen at the time.

Meanwhile, Whitlock has outstanding break-and-enter charges in Gatineau.

gdimmock@ottawacitizen.com

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