Judge rejects Zampino defence request to halt Contrecoeur trial
The Contrecoeur fraud trial is back on after a Quebec Superior Court judge on Wednesday rejected a motion presented by lawyers representing former Montreal city hall No. 2 politician Frank Zampino to halt the case.
“The only apparent prejudice at this stage appears to be defence delay,” Quebec Superior Court Judge Michael Stober said in his ruling, delivered at the Montreal courthouse.
The judge, whose ruling took an hour to read, accepted the arguments made by the Crown last week to reject the Zampino motion before even hearing it, saying the “proper forum” for such a matter is the court presided over by the trial judge.
The trial judge in the Contrecoeur case is Court of Quebec Judge Yvan Poulin, who had already rejected parts of a Zampino defence motion seeking further disclosure of evidence relating to a police wiretap in 2015 in a separate investigation of allegations of municipal corruption that intercepted several phone calls between Zampino and his lawyers in the months preceding the start of the Contrecoeur trial.
Poulin’s ruling could not be appealed, but Zampino’s lawyer, Isabel Schurman, had argued in petitioning the Superior Court that the intercepted calls between lawyer and client violated Zampino’s constitutional rights.
The defence motion also raised several other contentions with the trial, all of which have been dealt with and rejected by Poulin or other courts.
Among them was an earlier question about the impartiality of Poulin, who had previously served as a Crown prosecutor.
“The trial judge has been proceeding expeditiously on a plethora of defence motions,” Stober said, noting that a Supreme Court of Canada ruling in July 2016, known as the Jordan decision, established deadlines for cases to make their way through the court system.
The Contrecoeur trial began over a year ago, but only last month began hearing from its first witnesses, who are the police officers who executed search warrants in the investigation.
Not only was Schurman’s assessment that her motion filed in Superior Court could be heard in three days, Stober said, the motion — with its 324 paragraphs — would take weeks or even months to argue.
“It would be entertaining a notice of appeal in a different cloak,” he said. He added that it had the potential to “twist the criminal justice process into a roller-coaster” of appeals that would “meander” through other courts.
Stober also called the situation “ironic” given that Zampino’s defence and lawyers representing some of the other accused in the Contrecoeur case had filed motions for a stay of proceedings last year citing unreasonable delay and the Jordan decision.