Another murder trial stayed due to delays

A man charged with second-degree murder in connection with a 2013 slaying in St-Michel had his case placed under a stay of proceedings on Friday after a Superior Court judge ruled it took too long for him to be brought to trial.

Van Son Nguyen, a British citizen who was living in Montreal at the time, has been detained since January 2013 and was scheduled to go to trial in September.

Nguyen, 52, is the third person charged with murder in Quebec to have a stay of proceedings granted since last summer’s Jordan ruling, a Supreme Court of Canada decision that set shorter time frames in which cases need to get to trial.

“The accused has been detained this entire time despite benefiting from the presumption of innocence,” Quebec Superior Court Justice Daniel W. Payette wrote in his 20-page decision.

“The proceedings in the present case must be stayed. Justice delivered in due time is one of the characteristics of a free and democratic society.”

It was reported at the time that Nguyen had allegedly attacked the victim with a machete. Payette’s decision does not describe the incident in detail but notes that during a pre-trial hearing in 2013, Nguyen admitted the identity of the victim, the chain of possession of the seized items and the number of stab wounds the victim suffered.

But the severity of the crime, Payette wrote, “does not deny the constitutional right of any person to be tried within a reasonable time. On the contrary, serious crimes are those which the state must judge promptly to preserve the public’s confidence.”

The Jordan ruling, which Payette often cited in his decision, set limits on how long a person accused of a crime should wait for a trial. In Superior Court cases the limit was set to 30 months; in provincial court, it was set to 18 months.

In Nguyen’s case, the Crown had argued some of the delays were caused by the Montreal police force failing to provide prosecutors with an investigator to help manage witnesses and the evidence while preparing for the case’s preliminary hearing. The Crown also maintained the defence was to blame for at least eight months of the overall delays.

In the end, however, the courts ruled Nguyen’s case would have been delayed by a total of 55 and a half months by the end of his trial, a time span Payette deemed unreasonable.