Fingerprinting for summary offences illegal, activist argues
Local activist Jaggi Singh plans to present a motion at the Montreal municipal courthouse on Friday arguing that the recording of fingerprints and mug shots after people are arrested for summary offences is illegal.
Singh, 45, faces a mischief charge following his arrest on May 3 along with 17 other people during a protest that involved an occupation of Canada Border Services Agency’s offices in Montreal. The group, Solidarity Across Borders, was protesting against deportations in general.
Following the arrest, he received an order to report to a Montreal police operations centre to be fingerprinted. According to Singh — who is a familiar face at protests — he agreed to be fingerprinted on June 17, but the police refused to go through the process when he refused to tell them his place of birth.
On June 30, the prosecutor in the case informed Municipal Court Judge Randall Richmond that the prosecution intends to proceed summarily on the charges. A summary offence is a criminal act that can be prosecuted without an indictment or the right to a jury trial.
As part of his motion, Singh is calling for “all fingerprints previously taken, from potentially tens of thousands of defendants (over past decades), should be destroyed.”
As part of his motion Singh cites a 2009 decision by the Supreme Court of Canada where a woman in Alberta was charged with fraud under a section of the Criminal Code that gave the Crown the option of proceeding either by indictment or by summary conviction. The Crown decided to pursue a summary conviction because the accused appeared ready to enter a guilty plea.
However, just before the plea was supposed to be entered, the woman’s lawyer noticed the statute for a summary conviction had run out in the case and asked that the charges be dismissed. The Crown then opted to pursue the case through an indictment, but the trial judge denied the prosecution’s motion. Alberta’s Court of Appeal reversed the decision after ruling the evidence gathered in the fraud investigation was still valid. The Supreme Court dismissed the woman’s subsequent appeal.
The Supreme Court decision does not involve the recording of fingerprints by police. But Singh argues in the motion the decision “states that the nature of an offence pursued by summary conviction is different from that by indictment.” He also cites a 1981 Quebec Court of Appeal decision where the court ordered that a person who had opted to plead guilty to an offence as a summary conviction did not have to submit to being fingerprinted after the case came to an end.