EDMONTON TRIAL REFLECTS WEAKNESS IN GANG LAW

EDMONTON - After throwing out charges from the huge drug conspiracy
trial Monday, Court of Queen's Bench Justice Doreen Sulyma, joking,
said it's "freedom 51 for me."

It's not surprising the 51-year-old judge apparently felt relieved to
see the end of an incredibly complex case, which for 21/2 years never
moved beyond arcane legal arguments.

Her experience wasn't unusual. Several times in the past five years,
prosecutors in special courtrooms across the country have wrestled
with mass trials springing from allegations of gang activity.

So far, they have little to show. The Crown dropped counts of being
part of a criminal organization laid against the people on trial with
Sulyma long before she tossed out their remaining charges for
excessive delays.

A couple of minor players pleaded guilty to gang charges in Winnipeg's
Manitoba Warriors case. A judge quit a giant Hells Angels case in
Montreal, forcing it to start again.

Legislation introduced in 1998 was designed to crack down on gang
activity. University of Alberta law professor Sanjeev Anand says its
main strength is to give police a tool to pressure underlings into
testifying against their bosses.

"What they're going to have to do now, in order to have credibility
with people charged under organized-crime legislation, is
(successfully) prosecute them in smaller trials," he said Tuesday.
"That's what it's for, to go after the small fish."

Over three dozen people were arrested under Project Kachou in
September 1999.

The case was split into two trials in 2001, in hopes prosecution would
go faster. One trial, overseen by Sulyma, finally shrank to 11 people.
The other, involving eight people, is continuing.

"I think the Crown bit off way too much here," said Anand, a former
prosecutor.

"I understand the appeal of having a mass trial because a lot of the
evidence is going to be the same ... but in the end it didn't save any
money," he said.

Hersh Wolch, who represented accused Thi Le, says similar cases in
future must be better organized.

"There were too many people charged with too many (offences); it took
too long for the Crown to get into focus, and then it was too late."

Project Kachou didn't crumble from a single bad decision, but under
the weight of inexperience, poor planning and a mountain of evidence,
according to Sulyma's written decision.

The logistics were staggering -- logs of 281,000 wiretapped telephone
calls, hundreds of hours of taped conversations that had to be
translated into English from four Asian languages, and 180,000 pages
of other documents.

Authorities knew that under the law, much of this material had to be
shown to the accused so they could prepare a proper defence. Yet two
weeks after the high-profile arrests, there still wasn't a plan for
giving the accused copies of evidence.

Officials soon decided to put it out on CD-ROM. But there wasn't
enough equipment for prisoners being held at the remand centre to read
the disks, so in June 2000, a judge ordered the Crown to produce paper
copies as well.

Disclosing evidence became an enormous project. The understaffed RCMP
printing shop in Edmonton couldn't keep up and it was tough to get
some reports that were kept on the investigators' computers.

Sgt. Rodney Beck, the disclosure co-ordinator, testified this was the
first time he knew of in his 29-year RCMP career where material was
disclosed that had been electronically stored by police. He described
the process as "a nightmare," Sulyma wrote.

In September 2001, one officer produced two boxes he'd been storing at
home of background material from wiretap applications, unaware it had
to be shown to the defence.

During the next month, another 36 boxes of information turned up at
various offices in Alberta RCMP headquarters, a development the judge
called "shocking" so late in the proceedings.

The damage was magnified by the Crown's opposition to bail -- the
accused spent at least six months in the Edmonton Remand Centre --
when it ought to have known disclosure was so incomplete they had a
long wait for a trial, the judge ruled.

But there are supporters for big gang cases. Vic Toews, Manitoba
justice minister during the Manitoba Warriors hearings, described what
happened as a success. Several people pleaded guilty to drug charges
in addition to the men who admitted to the gang offences, said Toews,
now an Alliance MP.

"I said, 'I'm not allowing gangsters to walk free on the streets
because we won't put the resources there,' " he said.

[sidebar]

A COSTLY CASE

- - Court of Queen's Bench Justice Doreen Sulyma on Monday stayed, or
essentially dropped, charges of conspiring to traffic in cocaine
against 11 people arrested in 1999 as part of RCMP Project Kachou.

- - She ruled excessive delays in the case violated Charter of Rights
and Freedoms guarantees that trials must be held within a reasonable
time.

- - A separate trial involving eight other men arrested in the case is
still continuing, but they've made a similar application to have the
charges dropped due to delays.

- - The federal government has paid an estimated $20 million for defence
fees and disbursements; prosecutors have put in more than 40,000
hours, and the RCMP spent $1 million just to disclose evidence.

- - In addition, it cost the province $2.1 million to build a special
super courtroom.