Judge scolds JP for behaviour
Justice chastised for courtroom comments, conduct that brings ‘disrepute to the court’
A Halton region justice of the peace’s conduct during a 2017 trial “was not the kind of image that this court should present to the public,” a judge said in an appeal ruling this week.
For the second time in five months, Justice of the Peace Denis Lee found himself in the position of being castigated by a judge for comments he made in court. He called the defendant, who was not present for his own trial, a “boar” and doubled the fine submitted by the prosecutor for obstructing a licensing inspector to $5,000. The man had also been fined $2,500 for driving a tow truck without a licence.
“Now I may get slapped down if it gets appealed or whatever, but I don’t care,” Lee said at the January 2017 trial.
“I love Shakespeare, he’s always got a good word for whatever situation and this is ‘To thine own self be true’ and I think this has to be done in this manner. So the second fine will be $5,000. Both15 days to pay. And we’ll see what kind of bluster the defendant brings with him for a reopening request or an appeal ...”
The prosecutor interjected: “An appeal.” Lee: “... whatever.” The defendant did appeal, and Lee did get slapped down.
“The justice’s comments in this case were unnecessary. They were not judicial,” wrote Ontario Court Judge Moiz Rahman in a decision released this week, ordering a new trial. “This kind of behaviour not only creates an apprehension of bias requiring a retrial, but it brings disrepute to the court and the office of the justice of the peace.”
Justices of the peace, who earn about $132,000 a year, are appointed by the provincial government. Their duties include conducting bail hearings, authorizing search warrants and presiding in provincial offences court, which deals with non-criminal charges such as bylaw infractions.
Lee, a former Burlington city and regional councillor, was appointed in 2007.
In January 2017, he was presiding in the case of Gagandeep Sekhon, who had been arrested in Mississauga. Although properly served with a summons, Sekhon did not appear in court, and so what is known as an “ex parte” trial took place, where the prosecutor is still required to prove the case.
“An ex parte trial like this one would normally be a simple, uneventful matter,” Rahman wrote. “Unfortunately, from the outset, the trial justice decided that the court ought to serve as a stage. After the court clerk read the charges, and asked the court to enter a plea, the justice responded sarcastically as follows: ‘I’m going to throw myself on the mercy of the court and plead not guilty in absentia.’ ”
After convicting Sekhon, he decided to double the proposed $2,500 fine for obstructing a licensing inspector “to send the strongest possible message to the public, to these tow operators, that this kind of behaviour is totally unacceptable.”
“The business of dealing with the public is a tough one. And in this instance, we had a city inspector out there trying to do his job and dealing with a boar,” Lee said. “I’m not allowed to call him an idiot because I got slapped down for using that term for a defendant by the ju- dicial council. I don’t know if it was the term or the fact that I told him it was the least pejorative term I could think of at the time.”
In his appeal ruling, Rahman found that a member of the public reading all of Lee’s comments would conclude that Sekhon’s conviction “was a foregone conclusion from the outset.”
“A provincial offences court is the only interaction that most Ontarians will have with the Ontario Court of Justice,” Rahman said. “A court of record is not a place for a judicial officer to engage in sarcasm or selfaggrandizing humour. Nor is it meant to be used as a soapbox to express the judicial officer’s personal views. What took place during the appellant’s trial was not the kind of image that this court should present to the public.”
Philip Alexiu, the paralegal who represented Sekhon on his appeal, told the Star that “the appearance of judicial impartiality is of paramount importance to the administration of justice and the decision of Justice Rahman upholds this belief.”
Rahman’s ruling follows that of another Ontario court judge, David A. Harris, who upbraided Lee in an appeal ruling for his conduct during the trial of a man arrested for driving while using a cellphone.
“This is just the latest of a number of appeals that have come to me from the presiding justice of the peace,” Harris wrote in his December ruling. “His track record is such that I am not prepared to give him the benefit of any doubt with respect to whether he conducted the proper analysis and simply failed to articulate this in his reasons. I do not believe that that happened here.”