PRISONER NOT ALLOWED TO VISIT DYING WIFE, COURT RULES

Pandemic, prior record play role in denial

After passes to leave prison to visit his dying wife were cancelled because of COVID-19, a notorious Quebec gangster who once plotted the brazen kidnapping of Montreal’s Mafia bosses sued the government to force a compassionate release.

Despite acknowledging the “heart- wrenching consequences,” the Federal Court rejected Christian Deschênes’s plea.

Deschênes has a rich underworld history as a bold gangster and mercenary, not all of it successful.

A large hashish importation arranged by outlaw bikers and members of the Mafia in the 1980s ended with Deschênes in prison, after a truck used to move the goods got stuck.

In the 1990s, out on parole for the hash deal, he was supposed to collect one of the country’s most spectacular drug shipments — a plane load of cocaine worth $ 2.7- billion, flown directly from Colombia to a northern Quebec airstrip. Instead, the plane was chased by military aircraft and crash- landed, leading to its seizure and arrests, including of Deschênes and the pilot, Raymond (Cowboy) Boulanger.

In 2001, again while on parole, he was arrested in a shocking plot to kidnap Francesco Arcadi, the street boss of the powerful Rizzuto Mafia clan, and another mobster. Deschênes had built cages in a house north of Montreal to hold Arcadi and another mobster until Mafia boss Vito Rizzuto paid him $2 million he felt he was owed.

He was arrested by a heavily armed police squad when he was driving toward the café used as the mobsters’ headquarters.

And while he faced trial for that, he was also pinched as a conspirator in a dramatic $1-million armoured truck heist.

It all added to a cumulative sentence of more than 45 years.

In 2012, during a failed bid for parole, the parole board was told Deschênes’s risk to reoffend was “excessively difficult to predict.”

Deschênes, now 64, isn’t the hothead he once was, the parole board was told. He was older, more mature. His values had changed.

He had improved enough that, despite his notoriety, he is serving his time at the Federal Training Centre, a minimum-security facility in Laval, Que., and was granted permission for unescorted temporary absences by the Parole Board of Canada in October.

Although turned down for full parole and day parole, he was granted the periodic leaves “for personal development.”

The spread of deadly COVID- 19, however, got in the way. The pandemic scrapped the prison’s leave program, court was told.

Deschênes said his need is pressing and important.

His wife of about 15 years has terminal cancer with a dire prognosis of about one year, he said. Deschênes asked to be allowed to support her and be with her during the last months of her life.

Under normal circumstances, Correctional Service of Canada ( CSC) rules allow inmates leave for compassionate reasons, under some circumstances.

Commissioner’s Directive 710- 3 specifies one legitimate reason is to visit a family member who has “been declared by a medical practitioner to be in an advanced stage of a terminal condition resulting from illness or injury.” The head of a prison can reject leaves if the risk is deemed too great.

CSC decided Deschênes did not meet the criteria of Directive 710-3, although the reason is not specified in the court’s decision.

Deschênes sought a court injunction forcing CSC to implement the parole board’s granting of his leave privileges.

To interfere in how prisons run, the court “must be satisfied that the outcome presents a serious issue, that the applicant risks irreparable harm and that the balance of convenience favours the applicant,” Federal Court Justice Michel M. J. Shore wrote in his decision, made in late December but released in English on Tuesday.

Deschênes lost on all three tests.

Because he pressed a lawsuit before exhausting all internal prison grievance procedures, it was considered not to be a serious issue.

“As for irreparable harm, the applicant asserts that he and his wife (will) be harmed if he cannot support her in these times of instability. However, this was not supported in the written submissions,” Shore wrote.

And finally, the balance of convenience favours the government, because it has a legislated mandate to ensure the safety of the public, inmates and penitentiaries.

“It is in the public interest for (CSC) to observe the risks associated with COVID-19. With all due respect to the applicant’s testimony that he is in a delicate situation, the evidence on the record demonstrates that the pandemic remains a danger to the community, inmates and penitentiary staff,” Shore wrote.

“Like King Solomon, torn between two testimonies, the Court is faced with two pleadings that are not without heart- wrenching consequences, but, taking into account the case law, the balance cannot be tipped in the applicant’s favour.”

Requests for comments from Deschênes’s lawyer, Sylvie Bordelais, and CSC, were not returned by deadline.