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    • Victim of Vancouver stabbing had asked man not to vape near toddler, says grieving mom

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    Paul Schmidt was engaged to be married. He’d been with his fiancée for six years and they had a three-year-old daughter together. During a family outing Sunday, the family stopped at a Vancouver Starbucks for coffee. Schmidt never made it home.

    Schmidt’s mother, Kathy, is speaking out so people know who her son was.

    “I can only stress what a beautiful soul Paul was,” she told CTV News. “Paul was a family man, who lived for his family. (Paul and his fiancé) were two peas in a pod.”

    Police say two men got into a verbal altercation at a Starbucks in downtown Vancouver, which escalated into a physical altercation.

    Schmidt, 37, was then stabbed and later died in hospital. 32-year-old Inderdeep Singh Gosal is charged with second–degree murder.

    Schmidt’s mother believes it started with a simple argument.

    “I’m told that this person that attacked him was standing beside the stroller vaping and Paul had asked him, or told him to move, and not smoke in front of her. And that’s how the altercation started.” 

    “The attacker said to (Schmidt’s fiancée), ‘You better grab your kid. ’And then things escalated from there,” Kathy said.

    Vancouver Police Department spokesperson Sgt. Steve Addison wouldn’t comment on the sequence of events, saying the case is still under investigation.

    “We know what happened, we know how it happened, right now we’re working on understanding why it happened,” Addison said. “We want to better understand what was happening in the moments that led up to this.”

    Graphic, raw video of the incident has been spreading on social media. Addison again repeated his request for people not to share it.

    “Let's allow this man to have some dignity in death by not sharing graphic, gruesome video on social media,” he said.

    By Tuesday morning, a small memorial was set up at the site of the attack. A GoFundMe has also been set up to help Schmidt`s fiancée and young daughter.

    His family is still coming to terms with the shock and grief of losing a loved one so violently, and publicly.

    “How could this happen?” Schmidt’s mother asked. “How could anybody just go out for a coffee on a Sunday afternoon and have this happen to them, in what you would think would be a safe place, a safe environment?”

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    A man who has brain damage has a murder conviction reversed after a 34-year fight

    A man who has brain damage and was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a shopkeeper in London had his decades-old conviction quashed Wednesday by an appeals court troubled by the possibility police elicited a false confession from a mentally vulnerable man. Oliver Campbell, who suffered cognitive impairment as a baby and struggles with his concentration and memory, was 21 when he was jailed in 1991 after being convicted based partly on admissions his lawyer said were coerced. “The fight for justice is finally over after nearly 34 years," Campbell said. “I can start my life an innocent man.” Campbell, now in his 50s, was convicted of the robbery and murder of Baldev Hoondle, who was shot in the head in his shop in the Hackney area of east London in July 1990. He had a previous appeal rejected in 1994 and was released from prison in 2002 on conditions that could have returned him to prison if he got into trouble. Defense lawyer Michael Birnbaum said police lied to Campbell and “badgered and bullied” him into giving a false confession by admitting he pulled the trigger in an accident. He was interviewed more than a dozen times, including sessions without either a lawyer or other adult present. His learning disability put him “out of his depth” and he was "simply unable to do justice to himself,” Birnbaum said. He said the admissions were nonsense riddled with inconsistencies that contradicted facts in the case. At trial, he testified that he was not involved in the robbery and had been somewhere else though he couldn't remember where. A co-defendant, Eric Samuels, who has since died, pleaded guilty to the robbery and was sentenced to five years in prison. At the time, he told his lawyer Campbell was not the gunman and later told others Campbell wasn’t with him during the robbery. Lawyers continued to advocate for Campbell that he wasn't the killer and his case was referred to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission which investigates potential injustices. The three judges on the Court of Appeal rejected most of Birnbaum's grounds for appeal but said they were troubled by the conviction in light of a new understanding of the reliability of admissions from someone with a mental disability. The panel quashed the conviction as 'unsafe,' and refused to order a retrial.

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