Accused in terror case refuses court appearance
Judges permitted to compel defendants to appear, but action is rarely enforced
Rehab Dughmosh — the Scarborough woman who is accused of swinging a golf club and a knife at Canadian Tire employees and customers in a June 3 incident, and is facing 21 charges of terrorism-related activity — refuses to leave her cell, despite a discretionary warrant ordering her to appear in court.
A security officer on Tuesday told the court that Dughmosh, 32, had refused to be removed from the Milton detention centre where she is being held.
This was the second time Dughmosh has been a no-show at a hear- ing. In her absence on July 21, Justice Kimberly Crosbie of the Ontario Court of Justice appointed an amicus curiae, or “friend of the court,” to assist in maintaining the court’s ju- risdiction over her case.
In previous court appearances, Dughmosh has pledged allegiance to Daesh, also known as ISIS and ISIL, and “to the leader of the believers, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.” She has repeated multiple times that she does not wish to have legal representation and that she doesn’t believe in the Canadian legal system.
She has also expressed her intention to plead guilty and, if found guilty, faces a maximum life sentence.
Appointing an amicus is one way to move forward a case with an unwilling defendant, according to Richard Litkowski, a Toronto-based criminal lawyer. It has been done previously, in cases such as the 2013 Via Rail bomb plot, in which the two accused men also refused to appear in court multiple times.
“You cannot do anything meaningful in the absence of the accused,” Litkowski said. “It frustrates the ability of the court to move the case forward.”
In any case, a judge can make an order directing a jail to use reasonable force if necessary to bring an accused person to court — though Litkowski said he isn’t aware of any example of when this had been done.
Jails tend not to bring anyone to court who offers “even a token explanation or resistance, and they don’t tell the court about this until it’s too late,” said Anthony Moustacalis, president of the Criminal Lawyers’ Association.
“It seems that they’re delegating a lot of decision-making back to the judge,” he said, adding that if a defendant “says ‘I don’t feel like it,’ the guard will say ‘OK, we’ll tell the judge.’”
Dughmosh has been ordered to appear in court by video on Thursday, a step that Litkowski said will also require her co-operation.