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Independent
police probe urged
16-year-old
girl detained on officer's 'misleading' account
Lawyer says investigation should consider perjury charge
TRACEY
TYLER, LEGAL
AFFAIRS REPORTER, Jan. 6, 2004.
A lawyer has called for an outside police investigation into
the case of a 16-year-old girl who was denied bail and jailed
for two weeks after a Toronto officer gave a court a
misleading account of a fight.
Toronto
criminal lawyer Paula Rochman is asking Chief Julian Fantino
to have an independent police force investigate whether the
officer involved should be charged with perjury or obstructing
justice.
In
a letter sent to the chief yesterday, Rochman also asked that
the Toronto Police Service's professional standards unit look
into the matter and that the officer's immediate supervisor be
informed of the facts so he can take appropriate action.
Constable
Mike Hayles, a Toronto police spokesperson, said yesterday
that Fantino had already asked the professional standards unit
to look into the case to see how accurately a court assessed
the situation in a recent decision.
In
a ruling on Dec. 22, Madam Justice Sheila Ray of the Ontario
Court of Justice stayed aggravated assault and weapons charges
against the teen, finding that her Charter rights were
violated when she was detained on the basis of a
"misleading" and "embellished" account of
the crime provided by the officer in charge of the case.
Detective
Constable Marc Beausoleil's "sloppy" investigation
and poor record-keeping, Ray said, produced an unfair,
unbalanced synopsis of the crime, which led a court to wrongly
conclude that the 16-year-old was the ringleader of a brutal,
premeditated attack on another girl across the street from
Oakwood Collegiate Institute last Feb. 4.
The
officer himself conceded that his investigation was
"lousy," the judge added, noting the synopsis
contained 13 errors or inaccurate suggestions, including:
- The
fight was the result of a long-simmering feud, and the
16-year-old led the victim to the crime scene and hit her with
a metal pipe.
- The
victim was left with a broken nose requiring surgery.
- A
mob of 20 to 30 other people was also armed with metal pipes
used in the attack.
In
an interview, Rochman said as far as she knows, there has been
no other case in which a court has been asked to remedy a
situation where an accused person was denied bail on the basis
of unreasonable or misleading information. But what happened
to her client isn't an isolated incident, she added.
In
fact, speakers at a recent conference held by Ontario's
Criminal Lawyers' Association suggested that misleading police
reports could be contributing to the growing number of people
held in pretrial custody. There are now more inmates in
Ontario jails awaiting trial than serving sentences; 62.7 per
cent are charged but not convicted.
Rochman's
client, who cannot be identified under the Youth Criminal
Justice Act, spent two weeks in custody at the Vanier Centre
for Women and was released after a bail review. Three other
youths arrested in the incident were released from the police
station and a fourth was set free after a bail hearing.
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