COURT PIERCES TIP LINE SECRECY
Anonymity safe, except for the guilty: Court
OSHA WA, ONT .• When they convicted small- time weed dealer Keenan Corner of having murdered Shabir Niazi, an Ontario jury did more than send a young man to prison for shooting his friend.
Without knowing it, on Wednesday the jurors also lifted a veil on a secret decision made in September by the Supreme Court of Canada, a major ruling that allows courts to identify informers who offer tips intended to mislead police and obstruct justice.
Over the objections of the defence, Canada’s top court decided jurors in Oshawa could hear the Crown’s evidence that, after shooting Niazi, Corner called in a false anonymous tip to Durham Regional Crime Stoppers, an attempt to deflect police suspicion away from him and onto a group of dark-skinned men whom he made up.
By allowing an anonymous tipster to be identified in open court, however, the Supreme Court may also have irreparably broken the public trust in Crime Stoppers, a charity that assists police forces across the country and promises to protect its callers’ anonymity.
That dire prediction, at least, was what Crime Stoppers warned would happen when it argued before the top court earlier this year. The organization described the case as representing an existential crisis; if police can investigate the background of one of its tips, and if the Crown can present those discoveries in public, Crime Stoppers feared many potential tipsters would be too scared to help. “Without a guarantee of anonymity, it is likely Crime Stoppers’ programs would not be able to continue,” Crime Stoppers’ legal pleadings said.
“If public confidence in this crucial protection ( of anonymity) were lost, this important citizen initiative would cease to function.”
In a ruling that had been subject to a publication ban until Corner’s jury started to deliberate, however, the Supreme Court found that the promise of anonymity cannot serve as a cover for obstruction of justice. The court decided the anonymity granted to informers, called informer privilege, “cannot be interpreted to apply where it would compromise the very objectives that justify its existence, namely: furthering the interest of justice and the maintenance of public order.”
Crime Stoppers’ view was that as soon as someone calls them, a near-absolute promise of anonymity descends that the courts can never violate. Breaking that promise, even if the tipster were trying to interfere with a police investigation, would compromise its mission and the broader goals of supporting law enforcement. To emphasize this point, Crime Stoppers referred to documented cases of “serious, and even gruesome, acts of retribution to persons accused of being informers.”
In an interview, however, Crime Stoppers’ lawyer Robert S. Gill said he accepts the top court’s view that this chilling effect was overstated.
“What t he ( Supreme Court) said is we’re going too far with that, that in fact, if people are using Crime Stoppers to misdirect an investigation, they’re working against the whole reason why the justice system protects informers,” he said. “We protect informers in order to further the ability of the police to investigate and detect crimes.”
Though Corner initially denied it in court, the police had him dead to rights on the issue of the fake tip. They literally watched him do it.
In February 2014, when Corner and Niazi were both 22, they were partners in a small marijuana- dealing operation with a few of their friends, all of whom were hanging out in the garage of Corner’s family home in Ajax, Ont., on the afternoon of Feb. 19. Niazi died in the garage that day, shot nine times, including once in the back of the head.
The jurors were not won over by Corner’s testimony t hat, when t heir other friends had left, Niazi pulled a gun on him in a dispute over their business, that Corner wrestled it from him and then shot Niazi in self- defence as Niazi attacked him with a baseball bat.
The Crown’s position was that Corner and Niazi got into a fight, and that Corner shot his friend then lied to police about having been robbed in the garage by a group of men who stole their marijuana and shot Niazi.
In the subsequent days, police surveillance officers saw Corner stash the gun in a wooded area and watched as he made the anonymous call to Crime Stoppers from a payphone, claiming to have seen the men leaving the crime scene in the direction of nearby Lake Ontario.
At trial, Corner admitted lying to police and calling in the fake tip, claiming he had done so because he feared retribution f rom Niazi’s family.
Under the law, stripping away an informant’s anonymity is difficult to do. There is a longstanding legal exemption made in cases where innocence is at stake. In common practice, though, if someone calls in with information about a crime, then Crime Stoppers considers their motives irrelevant, even if for example the tip is from a drug dealer snitching on a rival.
“We never inquire into who our callers are, but I would be naive if I didn’t think that a lot of the calls are coming from the competition,” Gill said.
Crime Stoppers is now going to work on informing the public that if they call in good faith, they are entitled to protection — but if not, they aren’t.
The case is actually “very helpful,” Gill said, “because it does clarify and explain exactly when the privilege arises, and those rare circumstances where it’s not going to arise. We can work with this.”