Ruling to identify tipster could end Crime Stoppers

Crime Stoppers is going to the Supreme Court of Canada this week, fighting to keep an anonymous phone tip from being used in open court as evidence against a man accused of murder.

If the tip is allowed to stay in, as a trial judge ruled it could, that would mean the end of the crime- fighting charity, according to its legal arguments. Crime Stoppers’ foundational guarantee of anonymity would be vio- lated, and every future tipster would know their information and identity might come out in open court. To emphasize this point, it refers to documented cases of “serious, and even gruesome, acts of retribution to persons accused of being informers.”

“Without a guarantee of anonymity, it is likely Crime Stoppers programs would not be able to continue,” Crime Stoppers’ legal pleadings say.

“If public confidence in this crucial protection ( of anonymity) were lost, this important citizen initiative would cease to function.”

On the other side for Friday’s hearing is the Ontario Crown, which claims the tipster was actually the anonymous accused murderer himself, and therefore his tip was actually an effort to obstruct justice. That cannot be covered by informer privilege, the Crown argues, because the tipster was not a true informer, but a suspect trying to derail an investigation. The Crown is fighting for the right to reveal this tip to a jury as evidence of the accused’s conduct after the murder, and to undermine his general credibility.

The accused denies being the tipster, and sides with Crime Stoppers for the purpose of this Supreme Court appeal.

This is an existential crisis for Crime Stoppers, a nonprofit society with charitable status, whose operation in Ontario’s Durham Region, where t he murder t ook place, gets by on less than $40,000 a year, according to tax records.

Details of the murder are blacked out in Supreme Court documents, and a publication ban on the accused’s name is in place. What is known is that the charge of second- degree murder followed some event of serious crime in Durham Region.

On Feb. 26, 2014, the tipster called police, not the Crime Stoppers dedicated line, and was put through to Const. Dana Edwards, who was working for Crime Stoppers as a police coordinator. Edwards offered to put the tipster in touch with an investigator, or to take an anonymous tip. The caller was concerned about how quickly the tip would reach investigators, and when Edwards said it would be immediate, chose the anonymous option.

Edwards prepared a form that is clearly labelled a tip sheet, which is not to be put in any Crown brief or police report.

The tip was that, on the day of the event, the tipster saw something from the back porch of a residence. It appears from the unredacted details that the tipster did not recognize the significance of what was seen until hearing news of the murder.

The police were suspicious. They had seen something in surveillance of the accused that caused them to think he was the tipster. The crime scene did not reflect the tipster’s story, and there were some similarities between the tip and what the accused eventually told police. Police even started asking other witnesses if they were the tipster, which the judge found was “unnecessary and inappropriate.”

After hearing arguments, the trial judge agreed with the police theory that the accused was the tipster. In another hearing, the judge found the tip’s probative value outweighs its prejudicial value. So the tip was admitted as evidence. That is the decision under appeal.

The police and Crown position, backed by t he judge, is that anonymous tips are not automatically protected by informer privilege.