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Nova Scotia’s highest court has ordered a new trial for the man convicted of gunning down Tyler Keizer in a Halifax parking lot more than nine years ago.
The Nova Scotia Court of Appeal, in a decision released Wednesday, overturned the first-degree murder conviction of Adam Drake, who had been found guilty in a judge-alone trial in October 2024.
Keizer, 22, was killed in a parking lot on Gottingen Street late on the evening of Nov. 21, 2016.
Security video played during Drake’s trial showed two men standing on the sidewalk that night. One of them was Morgan Harrington. The other was the one who peppered Keizer’s rented SUV with bullets, killing him.
Harrington testified at Drake’s trial that it was Drake who pulled the trigger. Harrington’s testimony was the only evidence that directly tied Drake to the killing.
In their appeal of his conviction, Drake’s lawyers argued that the trial judge erred in accepting Harrington’s evidence as sufficient for a conviction. In its decision Wednesday, the Appeal Court agreed.
“He [Harrington] was acknowledged to be a quintessentially disreputable witness, whose evidence had to be approached with considerable caution,” Justice Anne Derrick wrote on behalf of the majority of the appeal panel.
The Appeal Court found that the trial judge, Justice Timothy Gabriel, did not find sufficient corroborative evidence to support Harrington’s testimony that Drake was the gunman.
Harrington’s credibility was undermined in part by the motivation for his testimony, the ruling said.
“The defence argued Mr. Harrington’s decision in January 2019 to give a statement to police identifying the appellant as Tyler Keizer’s killer was exclusively driven by self-interest,” Derrick wrote.
She went on to quote arguments advanced by Drake’s lawyers about Harrington’s credibility, saying he was trying to throw suspicion from himself and reap the benefits of immunity, personal advantage, money and preservation of his life.
In exchange for agreeing to testify against Drake, several pending charges Harrington faced were erased. Drake’s lawyers also pointed out at trial that Harrington was in line for a $150,000 reward from Nova Scotia’s major unsolved crimes program.
Drake’s lawyers had also argued their client’s Charter rights were violated, citing the 2016 Jordan decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, which set firm timelines for the completion of court cases. In superior courts such as Nova Scotia Supreme Court, that deadline is 30 months.
The Appeal Court found Drake’s case took more than 41 months to complete. But the majority of the appeal panel accepted Crown arguments that the extra time was warranted because of the complexity of the case.
Justice David Farrar disagreed. In a dissenting opinion, he wrote that the case was not particularly complicated and its length of time wasn’t justified. Farrar would have entered a stay on the murder charge, bringing the case to a sudden stop.
In a statement, the Public Prosecution Service said it is studying Wednesday’s decision and is now proceeding as though a second murder trial will go ahead. It still has the option of trying to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada.
While this conviction has been overturned, Drake is still serving a life sentence for the murder of battle rapper Pat Stay in September 2022.
Stay was stabbed to death in a downtown Halifax bar. The trial in that case proceeded without the jury being told about Drake’s conviction in the Keizer killing.
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