DAWSON CITY – Mark McDiarmid has been found guilty of three counts of assaulting a police officer, mischief and possessing a weapon for a dangerous purpose, and not guilty of the two more serious charges of attempted murder.

The Yukon Supreme Court jury brought a unanimous verdict back to the courtroom at 7:30 Monday evening after having deliberated on the case since shortly after 3:30 that afternoon.

McDiarmid immediately made it quite clear he will launch an appeal.

He said he could not understand how the jury members could have failed to comprehend the evidence of the conspiracy he had placed before them as early as his cross-examination of the Crown’s witnesses several weeks earlier.

It will be several weeks before sentencing can be handed down.

A Gladue report (a type of report that a Canadian court can request when considering sentencing an offender of aboriginal background), a pre-sentence report and possibly victim impact statements will have to be done.

Justice Elizabeth Hughes indicated she will be recommending a psychological evaluation of McDiarmid.

It’s expected it will be March 17 before the status of organizing these reports can be affirmed.

McDiarmid had been expected to appear in another case related to events in Whitehorse this afternoon, but that hearing will now take place on March 17 as well.

Monday had begun at 9:30 a.m. with the final argument of the Crown, presented by Jennifer Grandy in about 45 minutes.

She encapsulated the testimonies presented by the RCMP officers present at the events of Oct. 19-20, 2011, when police were involved in a confrontation with McDiarmid outside Dawson.

She asked the jury to see these as consistent as testimony from people who had seen the events from a variety of distances and perspectives was likely to be, varying in some small details but not in the overall arc of the story.

Grandy said an exact correspondence of experience would have been unrealistic and suspect under the circumstances.

“They are reliable, credible (witnesses) who corroborate each other.”

By contrast, she found McDiarmid’s testimony “evasive and argumentative,” and that his memories of the events were “unclear and shifting,” full of “speculation” and the product of an unreliable memory.

Grandy pointed to his continued insistence that RCMP Const. Justin Smith was present on Oct. 20, while everyone else agreed he was not.

She raised his refusal to believe that Const. Jeff Nielsen was one of the officers who shot him, despite Nielsen’s testimony that he was.

She dismissed McDiarmid’s theories about video and crime scene tampering, the former with reference to the testimony of the cyber-crime forensic analyst who examined the DVD evidence and declared it free of any alteration.

The three recovered casings at the scene corresponded to those test-fired from the two distinct weapons of Nielsen and Const. David Marentette, and the one recovered bullet came from Nielsen’s Sig Sauer pistol.

McDiarmid objected that the bullet that was analyzed was not the one that had been recovered at the scene.

However, Hughes indicated he had not been able to get the forensic expert to agree to that theory during his testimony.

Sgt. David Wallace’s account of the events of Oct. 19 overlapped McDiarmid’s account, differing in some details, but telling essentially the same story, in Grandy’s opinion.

In the Crown’s case, McDiarmid was shot because he managed to frighten the officers into believing he was going to hit them with the splitting maul he was holding as he ran towards them. He has testified that he did bear ill will toward these two officers and wanted to hurt them.

Faced with an approximately metre-long weapon coming at them, they fired when he was about 2 1/2 metres from them.

Following Grandy’s summation, Hughes called a brief recess, then began her charge to the jury, which took up the rest of the morning and much of the afternoon.

She reminded the jury members of their duties and that they now had possession of all the evidence that existed.

While McDiarmid had presented them with a vast array of speculation and theory, they could only credit that which they felt he had proved with evidence.

She then worked her way through all seven charges.

For the charge of mischief in the damaging of the RCMP truck, there was no doubt that the damage had been done and McDiarmid had admitted to it, Hughes said.

During her instruction, McDiarmid objected that Wallace had not been engaged in a lawful act when he asked McDiarmid to return to the detachment to deal with a bail breach warrant, but Hughes instructed him not to interrupt her.

The attempted murder charges involved details and cautions that were similar to each other. Hughes cautioned that the jury had to decide if he intended to kill or just do damage to the officers and their vehicle, since he had stated that he wanted to damage a vehicle for each time that he had been, in his view, persecuted by the RCMP.

During the discussion of the Nielsen charges, McDiarmid objected that this officer wasn’t even present on Oct. 20, and any claim otherwise was part of the conspiracy on which he based his defence.

Once again, Hughes instructed him to be quiet, and went on with her instructions.

Assault charges, she said, had to take into account the use of force to hurt or intimidate someone.

It needed to be clear that the assailant was willing and able to carry out the threat.

Damaging the truck with the sledgehammer was not necessarily the same as assaulting Wallace, unless the officer truly believed, as he had testified, that his person was in danger of injury.

Similarly, the assault charges involving Marentette and Nielsen hinged on their perception, and the evidence given by both Wallace and Const. Jordan McIntyre, that the accused had advanced on the pair of them with the splitting maul hefted in a manner like a person who is about to chop down with it.

Hughes reminded the jury of McDiarmid’s theory that any evidence presented by several officers was suspect because he believed it to be part of a frame-up, which had been constructed to falsify all manner of physical and digital evidence against him.

The final charge, possession of a weapon for the purpose of harming someone, had a somewhat different list of instructions.

It did include the caution that a splitting maul is not generally constructed to be a weapon, but that it can become one depending on the wielder’s intent.

McDiarmid had earlier claimed to have been shot while weaponless, but in the end, he did not object when the Crown and Hughes said he was holding it.

As such, said Hughes, it could be used to “injure, threaten, kill or intimidate” another person, and so could be classified as a weapon, one which he did not put down when told to.

Following the instructions, the 14-person jury was reduced to 12 by a drawing of lots, which misfired and had to be done over when the court clerk’s sleeve accidentally whisked a third card out of the drum the first time around.