Surrey Six accused wants murder charge tossed
The man accused of being the mastermind behind the Surrey Six murders 10 years ago is asking the court to throw out the murder charge against him.
Postmedia News has confirmed that Jamie Bacon’s legal team has filed a “Jordan” application to have the charge tossed because of extraordinary delays in the case.
Bacon, the Red Scorpion gang boss, has been in pretrial custody for 8½ years, a near record in B.C.
His trial is set for March 2018, almost nine years after he was arrested.
His lawyer Kimberly Eldred said the Jordan application was supposed to be heard in B.C. Supreme Court starting on Sept. 11.
“Unfortunately, another matter has taken precedence. The Jordan application has not yet been rescheduled,” she said.
The reasons for the delays have not been made public. Like most of the pretrial proceedings in the Bacon case, the delay application will be held in a closed court with no access by the public or the media.
For relatives of the two bystanders killed when four members of a rival gang were shot dead, the delays have been frustrating.
For 10 years, Eileen Mohan has hoped and prayed for justice for her murdered son Christopher.
He was 22 when he was dragged into a penthouse apartment across the hall from his family’s home and killed with five others in what became known as the Surrey Six murders.
Ed Schellenberg, also a bystander, was servicing the fireplace in Suite 1505 at the Balmoral when he got caught in the slaughter that Friday afternoon. The others who died were young men involved in the drug trade — brothers Corey and Michael Lal, Ryan Bartolomeo and Eddie Narong.
Mohan’s greatest fear is that Bacon, who is accused of ordering the hit on rival trafficker Corey Lal that spiralled out of control, may soon get out of jail without ever going to trial.
“For Mr. Bacon to be released without trial for the sins he has committed would be a total injustice to Christopher and a huge slap in my face,” Mohan said.
Schellenberg’s brother-in-law, Steve Brown, agrees.
The notion that Bacon is trying to get the charges thrown out is “bizarre,” Brown said.
“The courts have totally failed. They have lost control of this,” Brown said. “One of my thoughts about the court system is that it is designed for peacetime and it can’t handle war. Seriously, it is a gang war and these people are criminals and they are threatening our way of life.”
Wally Oppal, a former B.C. attorney general, judge and prosecutor, said delays like those in the Bacon case is extremely rare.
“It really impacts on the credibility of our system when it takes that long to bring something to justice, to bring him into a courtroom,” Oppal said. “We need to take a good look at ourselves to see if what we are doing is good enough and obviously it isn’t.”
Oppal thinks the Supreme Court of Canada did the right thing in 2016 when it imposed time limits on completing prosecutions. The court, in the ruling known as Jordan, said trials at the provincial supreme court level should be completed within 30 months unless there are exceptional circumstances. At the provincial court level, there is now an 18-month limit.
Vancouver lawyer Kevin Westell said it is hard to know why there have been so many delays in the Bacon matter because of the publication bans and closed hearings.
“We won’t know whether or not the actions taken on any side that led to this delay were reasonable or not until after final decisions are made,” he said.
Red Scorpions Cody Haevischer and Matt Johnston were convicted of first-degree murder in 2014 for their role in the killings.