Copyright: 2004 The Province
Contact: provletters@png.canwest.com
Website: http://www.canada.com/vancouver/theprovince/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/476
Author: Joey Thompson, The Province

CARELESSNESS ALLOWS INTERNATIONAL DRUG SUSPECTS TO SKIP TRIAL

What's scary about the latest court ruling allowing international drug
suspects to skip trial is that it was neither deceit nor underhandedness by
RCMP that caused the case to fold.

It was blatant carelessness. Some may even call it stupidity that cost the
drug team in Prince Rupert a trafficking case they had spent years and
hundreds of thousands of public dollars on.

Equally troubling is knowing it's not the first time B.C. has seen a major
Department of Justice investigation collapse because of police blunders.

The last reported botch-job occurred two years ago when the feds had to
release 10 men alleged to have brought 54 kilograms of heroin into B.C.
because Mounties got greedy while intercepting wiretapped private phone
conversations.

Ditto for the Prince Rupert Mounties, some of whom were deployed from
Victoria to head the probe. Court documents show police logged about 16,000
phone conversations in five months, but only submitted 72 as evidence, a
mere half of one per cent of what they had secretly recorded.

On my desk are at least 10 in-camera rulings by B.C. Supreme Court Justice
Douglas Halfyard that canvass the goofs by police in the voluminous case of
R. vs. Thanh Van Nguyen, his brother Loi, Chung Sze Trieu and My Phuong Cao.

Mounties:

- - Intercepted calls between a criminal defence lawyer and an accused;

- - Obtained cellphone numbers of accused from CityTel (phone company)
without a warrant;

- - Obtained court orders for production of records for non-targeted
(non-suspects) phones;

- - Obtained names and addresses from CityTel of subscribers of some
non-target phones;

- - Exceeded the powers of wiretaps granted by court authorization;

- - Submitted carelessly prepared affidavit material, which contained false
statements that could mislead the warrant-authorization judge;

- - Prepared, and had a judge sign, wiretap-authorization documents that
allowed them to gather much more material than what they had said they
needed in sworn affidavits to the court.

Halfyard had to decide whether to allow the Crown to admit the tainted
taped evidence or to scrap the contaminated evidence as inadmissible,
thereby letting the accused escape trial: "If illegally obtained wiretap
evidence is admitted on the kind and quality of evidence presented here,
that could not only be seen as judicial condonation of unacceptable conduct
by the police, but could also promote future applications for wiretap
authorizations based on insufficient evidence."

Prince Rupert defence lawyer Darrell O'Byrne said police don't work alone
on these high-end drug busts; they are advised by Justice Department
prosecutors every step of the way. If so, then police and prosecutors need
to consider retraining. No wonder the criminals love us.