The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 by Jonathan Kellerman

prosecutors eventually decided not to charge the people who had blocked the fire trucks or egged on the crowd. But five young men who worked in the fisheries were taken to jail on the mainland—arrested for offenses that could potentially lead to terms in the penitentiary. Two of the defendants were charged with having set the earlier fire, and three, including Carter Foster, were charged with participating in the shooting. (Ronnie Ross was charged with the same firearms violation and with having issued the fireball threat to Carter Foster and Sara Wormell.) A week or so after the incident, the R.C.M.P., apparently acting on tips that another person suspected of dealing drugs might be burned out, sent seventy officers to Grand Manan—a show of force that mainly just irritated the islanders. The mayor of Grand Manan, Dennis Greene, asked for an investigation of the R.C.M.P., which he claimed had spent a hundred thousand dollars on an after-the-fact invasion after years of saying that it didn’t have a few thousand dollars in the budget to put a drug-sniffing dog on the ferry.
    Overwhelmingly, islanders rejected the notion that the five incarcerated men were criminals. A sign went up at the ferry terminal in Grand Manan saying “Free Our Heroes.” All around the island, red ribbons were displayed to show solidarity with the defendants, who came to be known on Grand Manan as The Boys. A public meeting called by the R.C.M.P. to hear residents’ concerns turned into a dressing down of the police for lax drug enforcement and a pep rally for The Boys. When David Lutz, a New Brunswick criminal lawyer, went to the island to meet with some people about representing The Boys, he was asked what sort of retainer he’d need. He said twenty thousand dollars. The next evening, as he sat in his car waiting to get on the seven-o’clock ferry back to Blacks Harbour, a man he’d never met before handed him an envelope with cash and checks totalling just about twenty thousand dollars. The fund-raising efforts eventually included bake sales and the sale of T-shirts. The father of one defendant said later, “How many criminals are there that the community pays their legal bills?”
    In November, when the trial of The Boys got under way on the mainland, a county weekly, the Saint Croix Courier, asked its readers about their sympathies, and eighty-two per cent of the respondents said that they backed the defendants. “These five men did what Mr. McAvity just said that they did,” David Lutz said in his opening statement, after the Crown prosecutor had outlined what the jury would hear. “The issue is why they did what they did that night.” Lutz’s strategy was based on necessity: all five of the defendants under videotaped R.C.M.P. questioning, had admitted their roles in the gunfire or the arson. As the defense presented it, “They acted out of fear for their lives and the lives of others.” Lutz portrayed the gathering at Carter Foster’s house as a sort of “mobile neighborhood watch” that went “horribly wrong” when shots began coming from Ross’s house.
    If the crowd had gathered for the “peaceful intervention” that Lutz described, the Crown prosecutors replied, how come there were rifles at the ready? And what, they asked, does setting fire to someone’s house have to do with self-defense? Although “the Crown is not here to support Mr. Ross’s life style,” Crown Prosecutor Randy DiPaolo said, the defendants “do not get an exemption from the criminal-justice system because they’re fishermen or because they work hard.”
    Ronnie Ross’s record, introduced into evidence, reflected that before he moved to Grand Manan he was convicted of crimes like extortion and assault. He had never been convicted of selling drugs, though, and there was only sketchy testimony about drug dealing at 61 Cedar Street—most