Civil trial begins in police-abuse lawsuit
A civil trial involving allegations of excessive force against Ottawa police brought by a woman who was dragged into the police station, had her clothes stripped off and was left naked in a cell got underway Wednesday.
Roxanne Carr is suing Ottawa police and several of its officers for close to a million dollars after an arrest in August 2008 that she alleges resulted in her being left in a cell for several hours, bloody and bruised, with a broken wrist and without clothes.
Surveillance video expected to be entered as an exhibit during the trial shows Carr being dragged into the police station’s cellblock with her hands cuffed and legs bound, placed on the floor and searched before an officer wraps a strap around her arms to hoist her off the floor. She is then put into a cell. Minutes later, officers rush in and her clothes can be seen getting tossed out of the cell.
There is no video of Carr being provided a gown hours later; that surveillance video is missing.
Two officers involved, Sgt. Steve Desjourdy and special constable Melanie Morris, were implicated in another case involving a female prisoner whose clothes were cut off after she was wrongfully arrested.
Desjourdy was later acquitted of a criminal charge of sexual assault in that case; a civil lawsuit filed by the woman, who can’t be named because of a court-ordered publication ban, was settled out of court.
“She was dragged through the cellblock, tied up and had her clothing removed,” said Carr’s lawyer, Lawrence Greenspon, in his opening address to the court Wednesday.
Greenspon said his client’s personal-injury lawsuit is alleging false arrest and imprisonment, assault and battery, excessive force, negligent investigation and breaches of several of Carr’s charter rights.
Greenspon said he’ll ask the judge to find that police acted improperly and that Carr’s treatment at their hands was “unlawful, excessive and inexcusable.”
In her statement of claim, Carr alleges
She was dragged through the cellblock, tied up and had her clothing removed.
police used force maliciously as a means of “punishing” her for conduct that the officers considered disrespectful. None of the allegations has been proven in court.
The province’s Special Investigations Unit found no criminal wrongdoing by police, and an internal investigation by the department’s professional standards section also cleared the officers.
At the time Carr’s lawsuit was filed, police alleged there was a “crisis” in the cell and that Carr had tried to hang herself.
Carr, a 47-year-old former chef and chocolatier who once worked in high-tech, is suing for $975,000 in damages.
Carr was arrested after the exboyfriend she was living with called police and asked that she be removed from the Moncton Road residence they shared.
Criminal charges laid against Carr were later withdrawn.