ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — Nelson Hart told police a dispute over a spilled lunch tray while he was in prison escalated into a beating that left him bruised, an officer with the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary testified Thursday.
Hart, who was imprisoned in St. John's, N.L., pending an appeal of a murder conviction in the deaths of his twin daughters, was in court Thursday on three charges of making threats to cause death or bodily harm and one count of mischief to property.
Const. Matthew Dixon told provincial court the dispute at Her Majesty's Penitentiary began June 24, 2013, when, according to Hart, a prison guard shoved his lunch tray through his cell door slot and it spilled onto the floor.
A prison security camera video entered as evidence and played in court shows Hart laying on his bed as an item lands on the floor.
Dixon said Hart told police he came out of his cell into a common area and when a guard told him his food was on the floor, he grabbed a kettle from the common kitchen area and threw it into a wall-mounted TV.
Security camera video shows Hart throwing the kettle at the television before a correctional officer shoves him into his cell and onto the floor with two other guards behind.
Hart is seen on the video laying on the floor face down as those guards leave and later pointing and yelling toward his closed cell door before he lays down on the bed.
Minutes later, footage from outside the cell shows 10 guards responding. Eight enter Hart's cell and swarm him as they pull him to the floor and take him to a segregation unit with his pants around his ankles.
Hart told police that at one point he was punched with a closed fist as one of the guards told him to "squeal like a pig," Dixon said.
Dixon testified that when he took Hart's statement two days after the incident, he saw purple bruising on his left shoulder, both upper arms and scratches behind his left ear.
Hart, 46, has been free since the Crown decided last August it lacked enough evidence to retry him for first-degree murder in the drownings of his three-year-old daughters at Gander Lake.
A Supreme Court of Canada ruling last July concluded that confessions Hart made to police posing as gangsters during a so-called Mr. Big sting were inadmissible. It said those tactics potentially infringed Hart's charter rights and it cast doubt on the reliability of evidence drawn from similar investigations across Canada.
The top court judgment affirmed a 2012 appeal court decision overturning Hart's 2007 murder conviction and life sentence.
On Wednesday, Hart was found guilty of threatening a guard in a separate altercation at Her Majesty's Penitentiary in January 2013.
