TECHNICALITY KILLS MISCONDUCT CHARGES

Officers notified of police act hearing too late

Serious allegations of police misconduct involving six Toronto drug squad
officers - including questionable strip searches and searching homes
without warrants - have been dismissed on a technicality.

Superintendent Terry Kelly, a Toronto police officer who adjudicates
hearings into charges under the Police Services Act, halted the case after
the officers' lawyer, Harry Black, argued it had taken too long to bring
the officers to the internal discipline tribunal.

Black's argument was based on the provincial law governing police conduct.

The Police Services Act says officers must be served with a notice of a
hearing within six months of the complaint's facts first coming to the
attention of the chief of police. Unlike criminal charges, police act
charges must be laid and adjudicated within a set amount of time.

The deadline in this case was missed by about two weeks. As a result of
Kelly's decision to dismiss, delivered last week, evidence surrounding the
allegations was not heard.

The complaints stem from an October, 1997, arrest and detention of Toronto
residents Memis Sipar and Arthur Christopoulou. Based on information from
an unnamed informant that led police to believe Sipar was involved in
cocaine trafficking, and after police surveillance, Sipar and Christopoulou
were pulled over in separate vehicles on the afternoon of Oct. 28 and
arrested.

No drugs were found, yet both men were taken to central field command
headquarters for questioning. The two men were strip-searched. Again,
nothing was discovered.

While police held the men and kept them from making phone calls, officers
conducted searches of two addresses connected to Sipar - without obtaining
proper warrants, a police complaints investigator would later find.

Nothing turned up at those addresses either. Sipar was detained for six
hours and was released without charges being laid.

"The very essence of fundamental justice was denied" to the men, complaint
investigator Detective William Nelson wrote in his summary of the probe
into a complaint filed by Moishe Reiter a Toronto lawyer acting on behalf
of Sipar.

According to a witness statement in Nelson's investigative summary, this
was the fourth time Sipar had been arrested, and not one of those arrests
have ended in a conviction. In the three other arrests, charges were
withdrawn.

In his summary, dated April 27, Nelson found charges of discreditable
conduct were warranted against Detective John Schertzer and Detective
Constables Ned Maodus, Jonathon Reid, Gregory Forestall, Joseph Miched and
Steve Correia.

A complaint review officer agreed, and notices of a hearing were sent out
to the officers and potential witnesses the next month. But that happened
outside the six-month time limit.

Evidence presented at the motion for dismissal showed the force was
notified of the facts surrounding the complaint in a letter to the chief's
office on Nov. 7, 1997. Notices of a hearing were not sent out until May 22
- - about two weeks after the six-month window had closed.

Kelly said in his decision that the limitation rule "must be considered
mandatory, not merely a directive" and is a procedural step designed to
"protect the position of the officer(s) subject to the investigation in
relation to any proceedings which may be brought" against them.

Kelly pointed to an exception to the rule: The force can ask the police
services board for more time on certain investigations. But that wasn't
done in this case, he noted.

Police prosecutor Staff Inspector Tom Dalziel said he could not comment.
The complainant has 30 days to appeal to the Ontario Civilian Commission on
Police Services.

The police watchdog agency has the power to order a full hearing.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski