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| John L. Hill |
After repeated demands for cash were ignored, four masked men kidnapped him in a parking lot at gunpoint, forced him into a car, struck him on the head, bound him with zip ties and blindfolded him.
“I accept his evidence that he was forced to swallow a pill which caused him to feel drowsy and pass out. I find that, as a final stage of the kidnapping, the men drugged Mr. Manov before transporting him in the trunk of a vehicle and dumping him in the roadway,” Superior Court Judge Rita-Jean Maxwell found after trial (R. v. Owusu-Boamah, 2022 ONSC 3888). On Jan. 18, 2023, Marc Owusu-Boamah was sentenced to 10 years with credit for pretrial custody applied; he had seven years and three months left to serve (R. v. Owusu-Boamah, 2023 ONSC 496)
Manov’s assailants demanded the PIN to his bank and credit cards, forced him to call to ask people he knew to give him money and had him contact his bank to increase his credit limit.
During Manov’s 12 hours of captivity, he was drugged and tortured by having hot liquid poured over the midsection of his body. He was later hospitalized for second-degree burns to his stomach, legs, arms, hands, neck and nose, resulting in permanent scarring. He had lacerations on his wrists, consistent with having his hands bound, and bruising on his forehead, consistent with being struck with a hard object.
Owusu-Boamah was familiar with the court system. His pre-sentence report recorded that after Owusu-Boamah immigrated with his family from Ghana at eight, he fell in with the wrong crowd at his high school. Before this conviction, he’d racked up convictions for armed robbery, drug trafficking and assault. He was also on probation under two weapon prohibition orders. He had also absconded while on bail for the kidnapping.
Owusu-Boamah was convicted of kidnapping, extortion, use of an imitation firearm, fraud, aggravated assault, failure to comply with a probation order and administering a noxious substance. In challenging his convictions, he abandoned the appeal relating to aggravated assault and chose to appeal the conviction and sentence for administration of a noxious substance only. The issue, as at trial, was identity.
The appellant claimed that he was away accessing Manov’s bank accounts when someone else forced a pill into the victim’s mouth and made him swallow it and pass out. There was no evidence that Owusu-Boamah participated in that activity. He also appealed his sentence, pointing out that when the sentencing judge imposed a six-year concurrent sentence for administering the drug, she erred as the maximum sentence for that crime is two years.
The three-judge panel of the Ontario Court of Appeal did not find fault with the trial judge’s assessment of the appellant’s culpability. The appeal judgment (R. v. Owusu-Boamah, 2024 ONCA 704) accepted that the trial judge was correct in finding that what happened to Manov was a co-ordinated and well-planned group attack in which the appellant was a central player. Drugging was part of the co-ordinated plan. He was a party to the offence by common intention under s. 21(2) of the Criminal Code. The appeal court held that “there were multiple paths to liability available on the evidence. This is so even if the appellant was not physically present when the noxious substance was administered to the victim.” The conviction appeal on this issue was dismissed.
The sentence appeal was given more favourable treatment. The court was aware of an extensive criminal record. It was not recounted in the appeal judgment, but the St. Catharines Standard reported in 2018 that Owusu-Boamah had been one of four men arrested by Niagara Regional Police after a police raid led to the seizure of 112 grams of powder and crack cocaine, 7.5 grams of fentanyl and 1.2 grams of crystal meth. Owusu-Boamah was also charged at that time with failing to comply with a recognizance.
Nonetheless, leave to appeal the sentence was granted, and the six-year concurrent sentence was reduced to one year concurrent. It was a Pyrrhic victory for the defence in that even with the successful sentence appeal, the global sentence remaining on his other convictions remained unaltered.
John L. Hill practised and taught prison law until his retirement. He holds a J.D. from Queen’s and an LL.M. in constitutional law from Osgoode Hall. He is also the author of Pine Box Parole: Terry Fitzsimmons and the Quest to End Solitary Confinement (Durvile & UpRoute Books) and The Rest of the (True Crime) Story (AOS Publishing). Contact him at johnlornehill@hotmail.com.
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