Convicted killer seeks faint-hope hearing
When convicted killer Robbie Soomel lost his brother in a 2009 gangland hit, it had a profound impact on his life inside a federal prison, his lawyer said Wednesday.
Brent Anderson told a B.C. Supreme Court judge that the fatal shooting of Raj Soomel in a case of mistaken identity “was the catalyst for Mr. Soomel to change his ways.”
“It has perhaps provided him with a unique perspective on the harm he caused through his offending because he now is himself a victim of a family member having been murdered,” Anderson told Justice George Macintosh.
Anderson asked Macintosh to send Robbie Soomel’s case to a faint-hope hearing, where a jury would decide if he should get parole before serving 25 years of his life sentence.
Soomel was convicted of the first-degree murder of friendturned-drug trade rival Gurpreet Sohi, who was shot to death in a Delta basement suite in September 2000. And Soomel pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder for assisting with the contracted killing of Jason Herle in Abbotsford in 1997. Soomel was just 18 at the time. At his murder trial, he was also identified as a suspect in the still-unsolved 1998 assassination of journalist Tara Singh Hayer, who had agreed to testify for the Crown in the Air India terrorism case.
Anderson said that despite Soomel’s violent history and the disciplinary problems that plagued his early years of incarceration, he has been a model prisoner since 2010, taking courses, qualifying for escorted trips into the community and being “very active” in William Head Institution’s annual theatre production.
“He has really demonstrated that change where he is now a fundamentally different person than where he was when he was 18 and 20 years old,” Anderson said.
He argued that the purpose of a faint-hope hearing is “to determine what has been the change in the applicant’s circumstance that might justify imposing a lesser penalty.”
Soomel, now 39, meets the criteria for a hearing, Anderson said.
MacIntosh noted that his role in deciding whether to send Soomel’s case forward “is to guess what that jury is going to do.” A jury in a fainthope case must rule unanimously to reduce a killer’s parole ineligibility period.
Crown Dan Mulligan said Soomel does not meet the criteria because of the nature of his offences, as well as his conduct inside federal prisons where he amassed dozens of institutional charges and convictions.
“It says something about Mr. Soomel’s character that he was involved in two homicides, both of which were fairly intricately planned,” Mulligan said.
“In the Crown’s submission, there are very few indications in the Corrections documents that Mr. Soomel has expressed heartfelt or genuine remorse for the murders.”
He said Soomel tends to minimize his role in his violent crimes, suggesting he was influenced by others in the gang and drug world in which he was immersed as a youth.
In fact, Soomel ran his own drug business and had five or six employees at the time he targeted Sohi because he suspected his childhood friend of a drug rip-off and an earlier shooting.
“Mr. Soomel continues to minimize his own culpability. The fact is he was the ringleader who orchestrated the murder of Mr. Sohi and used his influence over others to conscript them into the conspiracy,” Mulligan said.
Soomel watched Wednesday’s proceedings via video monitor, looking very different from the baby-faced accused at his trial 15 years ago. Mulligan also explained how Soomel’s brother was shot near a Vancouver halfway house where he had been living after pleading guilty to attempted murder of a man who testified against his younger brother.
RCMP investigators probing the Hayer murder targeted Raj Soomel in an undercover “Mr. Big ” sting where the officers posed as members of a criminal organization to try to get the elder Soomel to provide information about Hayer’s murder. He didn’t. But he did try to hire one of the cops to murder a witness who testified against Robbie Soomel at his trial.
Two men linked to the United Nations gang were convicted in 2016 of murdering Raj Soomel after mistaking him for Independent Soldiers gangster Randy Naicker, who was living at the same halfway house. Naicker was shot to death in 2012.
Robbie Soomel’s hearing is expected to end today, with Macintosh reserving his decision.