'TROUBLING' CASE NEEDS EXPLANATION

"Simply baseless and groundless."

That's how Attorney General Chris Bentley reacted last week to
suggestions the Crown deliberately fumbled the prosecution of six
Toronto cops accused of corruption. The theory is they threw the case
against the Central Field Command drug officers to dodge the ugly
optics of a lengthy trial.

Then what did happen?

All we really know is that nearly 10 years after the investigation
began, highly respected Superior Court Justice Ian Nordheimer stayed
the charges, citing the "glacial" progress of the prosecution. He
found the Crown violated the officers' right to be tried in a timely
fashion due mainly to delays arising from staggering disclosure issues.

But the public needs to know why the case tanked and millions of their
dollars were flushed, say lawyers. The call was quickly taken up by
Opposition parties pressing for an inquiry.

Edward Sapiano, one of nine lawyers who wrote to internal affairs in
1999 after clients complained of alleged mistreatment by the officers,
pulled no punches, alleging, "the upper echelons of the attorney
general's office" sabotaged the case.

"The last thing in the world they want is witness after witness taking
the stand, testifying about how these things happened to them and
about our courts, our judges, accepting uncritically the word of the
officers," Sapiano told the Toronto Star.

"There should be some sort of very intensive review of what was done
at the prosecutor's level," Paul Copeland, a co-founder of the Law
Union of Ontario also told the Star. "The ultimate result in the
prosecution is totally unsatisfactory from everybody's point of view."

"Clearly there is something wrong with a situation where you have
charges being dropped due to administrative screw-ups or worse, and
that nobody gets justice," said Conservative leader John Tory. "We
need to have an inquiry to get to the bottom of this."

Meanwhile, it emerged RCMP Assis-tant Commissioner John Neily sounded
warning bells as far back as 2003 to the director of the ministry's
special prosecutions unit about problems with what he called Canada's
largest police corruption scandal in history.

But, while Bentley rejected the suggestion of intentional delay, he
said he couldn't comment on the specifics of the case because it's
still before the courts, revealing Crown lawyers are working "around
the clock" to decide whether to appeal.

He did, however, say several times in a scrum with reporters after
speaking at the OBA Institute, the "result is a troubling issue."

His boss, Premier Dalton McGuinty has also used the word "troubling,"
adding there is a possibility of an inquiry: "We're not ruling out a
public inquiry . . . we're not ruling it in." He said he was waiting
for Bentley's recommendation.

Indeed, there should be an explanation to the public about what
happened, either via an intensive review or inquiry. Anything less is,
well, troubling.