Murder, fraud, sex assault: some of the tossed cases
Here are short descriptions of cases from across Canada that have been thrown out over the timely access to justice:
Sivaloganathan Thanabalasingham, a Quebecer was charged with seconddegree murder. The charge was stayed last April, just days before the seven-week trial on the allegation was set to begin, because a Superior Court justice ruled the case had taken too long to get to trial. Thanabalasingham, a 31-year-old who came to Canada as a refugee, was accused of stabbing his wife, Anuja Baskaran, to death in August 2012. He was the first Quebecer to have a murder charge stayed because of the Jordan ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada. He was deported back to Sri Lanka on Wednesday. Van Son Nguyen, arrested in January 2013 on a seconddegree murder charge, was scheduled to stand trial this fall. In March, a Superior Court justice in Quebec ordered a stay after ruling the case had far exceeded the length of time within which Nguyen should have been tried. A native of the U.K., Nguyen was declared inadmissible in Canada and returned to England in June. Luigi Corretti, a former security firm boss who was accused of defrauding the Quebec government of millions, saw his charges stayed in November 2016 because there had been a delay of 70 months in getting his case to trial. The charges dated back to 2012 and his lawyer filed a motion to stay the proceedings on the heels of the Jordan decision. The trial was scheduled for 2018. Under what he called “very unique circumstances,” a Manitoba judge in January stayed charges against a man accused of abusing the child of his former commonlaw partner. A trial had been scheduled for April on charges of sexual assault, sexual interference, invitation to sexual touching and uttering death threats. The alleged offences took place between 1996 and 2003, when the complainant was between six and 12 years old. Justice Robert Dewar of the Court of Queen’s Bench found police mishandling of paperwork meant more than 19 months elapsed between the time charges were laid in August 2013 and the man’s arrest in March 2015. Dewar calculated the total delay at more than 44 months. He raised concerns about the degradation of evidence and witnesses’ recollections should the trial have gone ahead. Dewar said it was a close case, but that the wait to trial was “simply too long and outweighs society’s interest in having the case decided on its merits.” An impaired driving charge against a man from Saskatchewan was tossed in October after the case was delayed nearly 21 months in provincial court. In his ruling, Judge Miguel Martinez took aim at a common practice of overbooking courtrooms under the assumption that some people won’t show up or that some matters will be resolved beforehand. But on May 12, 2016 — the man’s second scheduled trial date — the court ran out of time and the case was postponed until November. The overbooking approach has worked more often than not, Martinez said. “However, the practice is not managing the court’s time and resources. It is gambling with that time and those resources.” In October, Justice Stephen Hillier of the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench threw out a first-degree murder charge against Lance Regan, whose case had been in the courts for more than five years. Regan was charged in the 2011 stabbing death of Mason Montgrand at an Edmonton maximum security prison where both men were inmates. Three separate trial dates were set — in October 2014, November 2015 and October 2016. Hillier calculated a delay of 621/2 months, but subtracted 24 months that he found were the fault of the defence. For instance, Regan fired two lawyers. In addition, Hillier also said the defence waited too long to seek disclosures in time for the third trial date. Regan’s case, nevertheless, exceeded the limits set out in the Jordan decision by more than eight months. Hillier said there was no suggestion that limitations on institutional resources affected how the Crown handled this particular case. But he did note — quoting from Jordan — how Alberta is “plagued by lengthy, persistent and notorious institutional delays.” He also highlighted the “long standing shortage of judges” in Alberta relative to population growth and demand. The Crown is appealing. The case of a man accused of sexually assaulting his daughter over a four-year period was thrown out of provincial court in British Columbia late last year because of a series of unreasonable delays. The judge blamed the Crown for “not pursuing this case vigorously,” citing two instances where the complainant was interviewed a day before the trial was scheduled to begin. The accused was charged in October 2014. An initial court date scheduled for a year later was twice postponed by six months. The defence requested a stay of proceedings after the prosecutor failed to produce a transcript of the interview until shortly before the trial’s third scheduled start date. The Crown argued the delays were the result of exceptional circumstances because of difficulties reaching the complainant. The girl’s mother did not forward messages from police and the Crown because she was suffering from a mentalhealth crisis, the prosecutor said. The judge rejected that claim, ruling the right to a timely trial is “a fundamental, ancient and basic right of citizens of democratic societies.”
A provincial court in British Columbia tossed out an animal cruelty case against a youth who was found guilty of torturing gophers. In his decision last October, the judge said the boy took animals he had trapped in snares in mid-2013 and skinned them alive. The youth was charged in July 2014. The trial was delayed because of a shortage of court time, despite concerns raised early on by both Crown and defence. The judge said he dismissed the case because of “institutional delay,” due in part to the case being heard in circuit court, which has a limited number of sittings every year. A postponement of two years and five months was beyond the 18-month limit outlined in Jordan. The judge emphasized the importance of the timely resolution for youth matters because of the impact protracted legal matters have on young people.