MONTREAL — He who represents himself in court has a fool for a client, the saying goes. In the case of Chuck Guite, the expression may be half right.

When it came to pointing the finger elsewhere and presenting the defendant in a sympathetic light, Guite proved a fairly successful tactician.

At other times, Guite irked the judge and was lost in a sea of legal procedure.

Guite's jury continued deliberating Thursday on whether the former head of the federal sponsorship program is guilty of fraud for granting $2 million in contracts to Groupaction Marketing Inc. for little or no work. The Crown alleges Guite defrauded the government of $1.5 million.

Guite chose to defend himself earlier this spring, tearfully telling the judge he had spent his life savings and couldn't afford the $200,000 retainer required to hire another lawyer after spending $130,000 to be represented last year at the Gomery inquiry. (The government paid $170,000 in legal fees for Guite at the hearings.)

The retired civil servant made frequent headline-grabbing assertions that Liberal politicians and their operatives ran the $355-million program in the late 1990s, leaving him and other bureaucrats to rubber-stamp their wishes.

Guite, 62, cracked self-deprecating jokes about his lack of legal knowledge and kept an agreeable ruddy-cheeked air for the jury, even when some of the evidence about his bureaucratic strong-arm tactics was less than flattering.

On some occasions, he was all the "charming scamp" as Justice John Gomery once described him in a newspaper interview.

At other times, Guite floundered through jurisprudence and the fine detail of the law.

In one of the final hearings of his trial with the jury outside the room, Crown prosecutor Jacques Dagenais asked the judge for permission to tell jurors to look for patterns in Guite's behaviour to fill in gaps in the evidence.

When Guite's turn came to argue against allowing the so-called similar act evidence, he was clearly out of his league. When he declined to even offer an argument, Justice Fraser Martin told him to think about it over lunch.

"I can go for dinner, go for supper, sleep on it, I have nothing to add," Guite said.

Guite annoyed Martin with his frequent testimonials, delivered when he was supposed to be asking questions of other witnesses.

"You have to discipline yourself," Martin told Guite early in the trial, out of earshot of jurors. "You have to transpose yourself out of Charles Guite's skin" while arguing or questioning as a lawyer, the judge said.

Martin was clearly losing patience at one point, leading Guite to quiz him on what he was allowed to do.

"I don't want you to lose your cool," Guite told the judge.

Martin replied: "I won't lose my cool. I'll try not to lose my cool."

And there were rookie mistakes.

It was Guite, not the prosecutor, who brought up the name of Allan Cutler, the Public Works whistle-blower who locked horns with Guite and was run out of his job for criticizing Guite's questionable contracting practices.

After Guite raised Cutler's name, the jury heard that Guite had Cutler "declared surplus" for their disagreement over Guite's fast and loose management style.

Guite raised no objections to the introduction of a damning statement by Pierre Tremblay, the man who replaced him as head of the sponsorship program.

"It's very dangerous for me to give you any advice under the guise of guidance," Martin said as he tried to encourage Guite to object.

In the end, the judge and the Crown prosecutor decided on their own to edit out damaging, irrelevant pieces.

The judge saw potential problems from the beginning, as Guite showed up to court without a copy of the Criminal Code and without having read the Gomery report.

A quick hearing to settle pre-trial matters soon dragged into a day-long process, with Martin trying to remain neutral while guiding Guite.

"I'm in a terrible position when you have no lawyer," Martin told Guite.

"I'm in a dreadful position."