COURT ASKED TO END CASE AGAINST DRUG OFFICERS

Accused Of Theft, Fraud: Defence Lawyers Allege Evidence Was Held Back

An Ontario court is being asked to drop charges against five Toronto
Police officers because Crown attorneys failed to make timely
disclosure of evidence that might have exonorated them.

Five defence lawyers who represent the accused officers made the
allegation in a motion filed yesterday.

The officers are among 13 former members of the force's beleagured
drug squad facing a slew of theft and fraud-related charges in
connection with an internal affairs investigation into the "fink
fund," from which plainclothes police pay confidential informants.

The five are charged with 193 criminal offences in connection with
the alleged misappropriation of $4,940 in 20 separate transactions
with eight informants over the course of five years.

In court documents, lawyers Gary Clewley, Dan Kirby, Peter Dotsikas,
Robert McGee and Leslie Pringle allege that three months after the
five were first arrested in April last year, the chief complainant
against them -- a man known as No. 186, as all informants are known
by number -- recanted and had his physician send a letter to
prosecutors to this effect on his behalf.

In this letter, as the National Post revealed this week in a story
about the investigation that is now in its third calendar year, the
doctor said No. 186 had severe memory problems caused by a head
injury and numerous medications he was taking.

As a result, the doctor said in the letter, what No. 186 told
investigating detectives from internal affairs "was not true."

Since the allegations from No. 186 comprise the sole charges against
three of the five officers and account for about half of those
against the remaining two, the letter of recantation was significant,
and arguably meant there was virtually now no evidence against them.

Prosecutors are obliged to disclose to defence lawyers the case
against their clients in a timely way.

But what happened in this case, the five lawyers allege, is that
prosecutors quietly held on to the letter for six months, long after
police had interviewed the doctor and confirmed it was authentic and
after prosecutors are alleged to have suggested, before a judge, it
didn't exist.

After a copy was sent to defence counsel in December last year, the
lawyers promptly turned it over to the Crown and demanded to know why
they hadn't been told of its existence.

Instead, the defence lawyers allege in the documents, prosecutors
called in the Ontario Provincial Police to investigate who had
created the letter and how the defence had come into possession of a
copy. That investigation, the lawyers say, "cleared everyone" of any
wrongdoing -- but the defence learned this only in June this year, a
full year after prosecutors first received the letter.

As evidence that prosecutors have developed "tunnel vision" about the
accused officers' guilt, the lawyers point to their "continued
insistence that [the accused officers] and their counsel were
responsible for the creation of the letter ..." and their continued
reliance upon a discredited witness.

The five accused officers -- Gary Corbett, Rod Lawrence, Wayne Frye,
Gordon Ramsay and Rick Franklin -- have been reassigned from active
duty since their arrest.