MASSIVE DRUG CASE FOLDS

Is This High-Security Courtroom a $2m White Elephant?

EDMONTON - A massive drug-conspiracy case considered one of Canada's
biggest prosecutions fell apart Monday when a judge threw out charges
against 11 people accused of conspiring to sell cocaine.

The four-year proceeding has cost Ottawa about $20 million in fees for
defence lawyers alone, but legal arguments bogged it down for so long
that it wasn't likely to go in front of a jury until at least 2004.

Although the case was split into two trials in 2001 in hopes of
speeding things up, Court of Queen's Bench Justice Doreen Sulyma ruled
matters in front of her had still dragged on far too long.

"The right to a fair trial encompasses the right to a reasonably
speedy trial. In this case, that right has been compromised, largely
by Crown action."

She strongly criticized the time it took to give the defence 180,000
pages of evidence amassed by police, particularly 38 boxes of material
that in 2001 the RCMP found they'd been keeping in storage.

Most of the evidence involved thousands of wiretapped telephone
conversations.

Sulyma assumed police didn't know how much detail they were legally
required to turn over and that they, together with prosecutors, hadn't
set up proper procedures to ensure all the evidence was disclosed.

"The discovery of a huge amount of material in K-Division (Alberta
RCMP headquarters) and elsewhere almost one year after this trial
began is nothing short of shocking," she wrote in a 122-page judgment.

This situation was made worse by the Crown's attempts to exclude some
of the information from the hearing, she said.

Sulyma calculated government action held up the proceedings by almost
a year.

However, she also blamed "significant" delay on the defence, saying
"unfocused and unnecessary ... challenges of dubious merit" during
motions for access to evidence added another 171/2 weeks to the hearings.

But in the end, the judge accepted a defence application to stay, or
essentially drop, all the charges, concluding Charter of Rights and
Freedoms guarantees of trial within a reasonable time had been violated.

With the 10 men and one woman spending from six months to one year in
the Edmonton Remand Centre following their arrest on Sept. 24, 1999,
"the delay which has occurred in these proceedings cannot be
tolerated," the judge said.

The defendants, all now out on bail, hugged each other and cheered
after the decision.

"I feel much better, my heart is beating so hard," said one man,
charged as a young offender and transferred to adult court.

"I've been on this case since I was 17. I'm 22 now."

Another accused, who refused to give his name, is still upset his bail
conditions stopped him from leaving the country to visit a dying
relative. "I feel great. Life's back, freedom ... We put our lives on
hold for four years."

Three dozen people were arrested during co-ordinated raids by 341
Edmonton police and RCMP in what they code-named Project Kachou.

With guilty pleas and charges being withdrawn or stayed, only 19
accused were left.

Eight men -- nicknamed the Group of Eight -- still face hearings in
front of Court of Queen's Bench Justice Mel Binder, but they asked
last week to have their charges dismissed due to similar delays.

Defence lawyers involved in the case predict the enormous time and
complexity of Project Kachou makes it unlikely trials involving dozens
of accused will be attempted again.

"There will always be a problem with how many people you can try at
the same time," Bill Tatarchuk said.

"I expect the feds will have to think about ... whether they're going
to try to prosecute more than (eight to 10) people."

Any future big investigations must decide in advance how to organize
evidence and how to get it in an understandable form to the defence,
Tatarchuk said.

He and his colleagues doubt the prosecution will appeal.

"I think they're just glad it's all over ... there were estimates it
could go on another two or three years."

A federal Justice spokeswoman declined comment while officials in the
department study the decision.

But defence lawyer Murray Stone called Sulyma's judgment "blistering,"
saying people should be upset at the multimillion-dollar price tag for
a failed prosecution.

"That's one of the reasons the minister of justice ought to inquire
into this. When you think of the types of alternative uses that money
could be put to, it's a public outrage."