Two charges against Ghomeshi dropped
Trials on remaining six counts set for February and June next year
After months of heat and emotional public discussion if not angst in the Jian Ghomeshi case, this week came the formal beginning of the cooler process that is the criminal justice system.
At the latest routine appearance by his lawyers at the College Park courts in Toronto Tuesday — Ghomeshi himself wasn’t required to be there — prosecutor Mike Callaghan withdrew two of the eight charges Toronto Police laid against the former CBC Radio host earlier this year.
Practically speaking, it was a winnowing down of the charges to those that have the best chance of conviction.
That test — it’s called “a reasonable prospect of conviction” and means prosecutors must believe they have a reasonable shot at conviction — is a normal part of the process.
Especially in a multiple-count case, it isn’t unusual that some charges are dropped before trial.
In Ontario and in most provinces in Canada, police and prosecutors have two different jobs and two very different standards that govern their decisions.
Police investigate complaints and must have “reasonable and probable grounds,” or RPG, to believe an offence has been committed and thus to lay a charge.
Generally in Ontario, police don’t consult prosecutors first, and on the few occasions where they may, it’s the police who make the decision to charge, with prosecutors just giving advice.
But once a charge is laid, prosecutors have carriage of it, and make their decision whether to proceed or not independently of the police. This is called “charge screening,” where at an early stage Crown lawyers more thoroughly assess the evidence and any frailties or potential difficulties with the case.
All Callaghan said in court was that the two dropped charges have no reasonable prospect of conviction and that he had spoken to the two women complainants involved.
The dropped charges relate to two alleged sexual assaults, one in Toronto and one in Owen Sound, Ont., respectively in 2003 and 2002.
That leaves the 47-yearold former star of Q facing four charges of sex assault and one of choking involving three different women, all dating to 2002 and 2003, and a separate charge of sex assault involving a fourth woman in 2008.
His judge-alone trial date on the five charges has been set for February of next year, with the lone sex assault case to be tried next June.
The separate sex assault, Callaghan said without elaborating further, involves a “different factual context.”
Ghomeshi remains free on $100,000 bail and conditions that require him to stay in Ontario and live with his mother. His lead lawyer, Marie Henein, has said he will plead not guilty to all charges.
He was fired by CBC last fall, and his downfall from cultural icon to pariah became part of a national, if not international, online conversation about sex assault and sexual harassment, with women and some men coming forward to publicly disclose, often for the first time, their own experiences. As a part of that, a secondary discussion arose about why so many sex assaults aren’t reported to police.
If it was a cathartic exercise, it also appeared to propel at least some of Ghomeshi’s accusers to go to police.
As a result, where once it seemed he would be tried only in the volatile and unregulated court of public opinion, he will now be tried in a court of law, with all its time-honoured safeguards and rules, where witnesses testify under oath and are subject to crossexamination.
The names of all the complainants but one, the actress and Royal Canadian Air Force officer Lucy DeCoutere who asked that her name not be protected, are covered by a publication ban.
Earlier this year, DeCoutere told Maclean’s magazine that testifying at the coming trial doesn’t alarm her. “I refuse to be intimidated by a process that is designed to get the truth about something,” she said.
“I cannot entertain that it’s more complicated than that.”