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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
A man found guilty of assaulting police officers, resisting arrest and threatening to kill a woman and her children is appealing some of the charges against him.

Supreme Court Justice Louise Charbonneau is mulling over a judgment in the appeal, which was heard on Monday.

In February, Justice Christine Gagnon sentenced Lyle Omilgoituk, 33, to 21 months in jail, minus six months credit for time served, on seven charges.

On Sept. 5, 2010, Omilgoituk was attacked on his way home from a downtown bar. Heavily intoxicated at the time, he accused a woman and her eldest son of orchestrating the attack.

While pinning the woman down at his Lanky Court apartment, he told her he could "crush her throat," "slice (her son's) face and watch him die" and would then "deal with" her two younger children.

The woman's eldest son then hit Omilgoituk twice in the head with a weightlifting bar, leaving a deep gash on his forehead.

Later, when police arrived to assist paramedics in bringing Omilgoituk to the hospital, he resisted arrest and threatened to kill one of the officers.

The RCMP responded by punching and kicking Omilgoituk in the head and ribs before dragging him down a flight of stairs.

One of the officers had to replace his boots because he could not clean the offender's blood off of them.

Gagnon found that police did not use excessive force in subduing the man.

Omilgoituk's lawyer, Caroline Wawzonek, argued there were grounds for an acquittal on several charges and also said the 21-month sentence is excessive. Wawzonek said there were "fairly dramatic inconsistencies" in the testimonies of several officers in terms of the decision to drag Omilgoituk down the stairs. Gagnon had patched together aspects of the various testimonies to arrive at the accepted version of the facts, said Wawzonek, but in her written decision the judge failed to acknowledge the inconsistencies or explain how she had decided which facts to accept.

Wawzonek said some of the officers had given testimony that could possibly have helped absolve Omilgoituk of guilt on certain charges but that Gagnon, without giving explanation, had accepted a conflicting version of events.

Wawzonek also argued that Omilgoituk's threat to "deal with" the two younger children was too ambiguous to meet the criminal standard for uttering threats, which requires that the accused threaten serious bodily harm. Given the context in which they were said, Wawzonek said the words could have meant "a number of things up to serious bodily harm" and the female victim had testified that she was not positive those were the words Omilgoituk used.

Gagnon "never provided an explanation as to why the context gave enough meaning to those words to find beyond a reasonable doubt that they constituted a criminal threat," she said.

Wawzonek said she felt that because all the charges stemmed from one sequence of events, the appropriate sentence, given the finding of guilt on all charges, would have been in the range of 12-14 months, minus

credit for time served.

Charbonneau said she hopes to have a judgment ready shortly.

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