Mr. Big sting murder conviction upheld
Supreme Court says confessions admissible
OTTAWA — The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that an Alberta court was right when it allowed statements made by an accused murderer during a police sting operation to be entered as evidence.
The unanimous ruling upholds a first-degree murder conviction against Dax Richard Mack.
In February 2008, Mack was convicted of shooting his roommate, Robert Levoir, and burning his body in a wooded area near Fort McMurray.
In a police sting known as a Mr. Big operation, Mack told undercover Mounties posing as gangsters that he’d killed Levoir and then disposed of the body on his father’s land.
Mack insisted during his trial that his confession was fake and aimed at impressing the supposed gang.
In a July ruling, the Supreme Court warned Canadian police forces against relying on Mr. Big operations.
That case involved Nelson Hart, a man convicted of murdering his three-year-old twin daughters after they drowned in Gander Lake, N.L., in 2002.
The top court said Mr. Big confessions should be excluded where the prejudicial effect outweighs the probative value, or where they are the product of an abuse of process.
In doing so, it ruled confessions Hart made to undercover Mounties could not be used against him. Murder charges against Hart were dropped for lack of evidence and he was released after serving nine years behind bars.
But in the Mack case, the Supreme Court said, the confessions were admissible.
“In my view, any prejudicial effect arising from the Mr. Big confessions is easily outweighed by their probative value,” Justice Michael Moldaver wrote for the court.
Mack’s confessions to undercover Mounties were the same he made to others, the justices found. And the fake gang offered him a relatively minimal payoff, $5,000 over several months at a time when he was gainfully employed.
There was also no violence threatened and no improper conduct by the police, the justices said.
“Moreover, there was an abundance of evidence that was potentially confirmatory,” Moldaver wrote.
The ruling suggests that not all Mr. Big operations are inherently flawed.
Kouri Keenan, a criminology PhD student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, who has written a book analyzing Mr. Big stings in Canada, said the Hart decision was a “game-changer.” But it didn’t rule such stings are unconstitutional and they will likely continue to be used by police.
“The thing we have to keep in mind is that the analysis of a confession obtained by virtue of a Mr. Big sting is done on a case-by-case basis,” Keenan said.
The sting “has proven to be an effective investigative tool and it may very well produce reliable confessions in the future.”