Parties chastised for courtroom spat

Supreme Court final step in bruising case

It began 11 years ago in a Montreal courtroom with a brief but terrible fury of ugly words between a Superior Court judge and a Hells Angels lawyer.

It ended Thursday with a Supreme Court of Canada ruling that quietly chastises both jurists while dealing with the broader issue of an individual’s Charter rights of free expression and the need of administrative bodies to discipline their members for speaking with an uncivil tongue.

The case has had a bruising effect on both parties.

The judge, Jean-guy Boilard, withdrew in the middle of a complicated and wellpublicized Hells Angels murder mega-trial, his reputation seriously battered by a barrage of criticism from fellow jurists.

The lawyer, Jean Doré, was suspended for 21 days by the Quebec Bar after ruling his abusive language breached the Bar’s code of ethics.

Doré appealed the Bar decision. The Supreme Court judgment, written by Justice Rosalie Abella, upheld Doré’s censure, saying the Bar had reasonably balanced the need to maintain public expectations of good conduct against Doré’s free-speech rights.

The Doré case began in 2001 when he appeared before Boilard to request a stay of proceedings or bail for his client, Daniel Lantier, who had been charged with 13 counts of murder as well as attempted murder, gangsterism and money laundering.

Boilard, who had a wellestablished reputation for publicly and often personally chastising lawyers in his courtroom, told Doré that “an insolent lawyer is rarely of use to his client.”

In his written ruling rejecting Doré’s application, Boilard carried his criticism even further. He called him “bombastic” and impudent. He went on to say that his pleadings were “totally ridiculous” and amounted to “idle quibbling.” He concluded that Doré was “fixated on or obsessed with his narrow vision of reality, which is not consistent with the facts,” adding he “has done nothing to help his client discharge his burden.”

A furious Doré immediately wrote a “personal” letter to Boilard claiming he hid behind his status as a judge “like a coward.”

“If no one has ever told you the following, then it is high time someone did,” Doré wrote. “Your chronic inability to master any social skills (to use an expression in English, that language you love so much), which has caused you to become pedantic, aggressive and petty in your daily life, makes no difference to me; after all, it seems to suit you well.”

He then attacked the judge’s professionalism and legal knowledge, calling him, in the Supreme Court’s translation of his words, “loathsome, arrogant and fundamentally unjust, and accusing him … of having a chronic inability to master any social skills, of being pedantic, aggressive and petty, and of having a propensity to use his court to launch ugly, vulgar and mean personal attacks.”

After sending the letter, Doré complained about Boilard’s conduct to the Canadian Judicial Council, which oversees complaints against judges.

At the same time, the Quebec Bar Association began investigating Doré because of his abusive letter to Boilard.

In 2002, a committee of judges led by Alban Garon, chief of the tax court of Canada, wrote a strong denunciation of Boilard’s criticism of Doré claiming it was “gratuitously degrading” and “humiliating” and showed a “flagrant lack of respect for an officer of the court.”

The letter noted that the Quebec Court of Appeal had observed that “you tend to use your platform to unjustly denigrate counsel appearing before you.”

After the letter was published in the media, Boilard recused himself in 2003 from one of the two Hells Angels mega-trials and a new judge was appointed in his place.

The Supreme Court recognized that a lawyer has a right to defend his client as well as himself against criticism from the bench, but cannot overstep “generally accepted norms of moderation and dignity.”

“As the Disciplinary Council found, Doré’s letter was outside those expectations. His displeasure with the judge was justifiable, but the extent of the response was not.”

Doré, who still represents Hells Angels, refused to comment on the judgment.

Last November, he was savagely beaten by unknown assailants.

In June 2007, Garon, who had retired from the tax court, was found murdered in his Ottawa condominium along with his wife and a neighbour. The case remains unsolved.

Boilard is still a judge of the Superior Court.