Averting a miscarriage of justice
Falsehoods alleged in police testimony
The police take seriously the duty to honour their brethren who fall in the line of duty. The Toronto police failed to do so for Det. Const. Jeffrey Northrup by their conduct at the trial of Umar Zameer, who was acquitted of first-degree murder charges on Sunday.
Zameer had returned to his car late on Canada Day 2021 in the Toronto City Hall parking garage. He was accompanied by his pregnant wife and two-year-old son. Northrup and his fellow officer, Lisa Forbes, approached the car and started yelling and banging on the hood.
The two officers were investigating a robbery. They were in plain clothes. Zameer thought that he, his expectant wife and young son were being robbed — or perhaps worse. He reversed, swerved and then drove forward to escape the officers — putative assailants, in his mind — running over Northrup and killing him.
Killing a police officer is a first-degree murder charge, even without the usual premeditation. The question at trial was whether Zameer saw Northrup when he ran over him, and whether he knew that the plain clothes officers were in fact the police.
I wrote last week about the corrupt state of American criminal justice, where the prosecutocracy operates on the principle that if the law doesn’t fit, you must still convict. Canadians ought not be complacent. While things are not nearly as bad here as south of the border, they are not good.
At trial, Sgt. Forbes testified that Northrup was standing up in front of Zameer’s car, hands raised, urging him to stop. Her testimony was not true, as demonstrated by video evidence as well as crash reconstruction experts for both the Crown and the defence.
That’s a serious problem, but perhaps understandable. Eyewitness evidence is notoriously unreliable. Having lost her partner, perhaps Forbes’ memory was clouded as to what happened; perhaps she convinced herself that what she wanted to be true was in fact true. Nevertheless, wittingly or not, she told falsehoods under oath. More likely wittingly, which would justify a charge of perjury.
“(Sgt. Forbes) has given a version of the events that didn’t happen, and now two other officers have the same version somehow. That’s bizarre,” Ontario Superior Court Justice Anne Molloy said in court, while the jurors were absent. Not that bizarre. Another officer testified that the officers at the scene compiled their notes together
in the same room, all the better to get the preferred story straight.
It was to Zameer’s advantage — and to the cause of justice — that the possible perjury was offered with rather remarkable incompetence. The jury saw right through the made-up police story and acquitted him. Molloy offered an apology to him in court, a highly unusual thing to do, but entirely fitting given the brazen attempt by the prosecutors and police to convict an innocent man. The officers are now subject to an OPP review of their conduct.
The detail that Northrup was standing up when in fact he had already been knocked down was striking. Did Forbes and her colleagues take creative inspiration from the RCMP officers who killed Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport in 2007?
Recall that Dziekanski had become agitated after a long delay in the international arrivals area, and the RCMP were called. Four officers responded, took Dziekanski down, and used a Taser on him repeatedly. He died at the scene of a heart attack.
A citizen recorded video of the killing, and the RCMP moved quickly to seize and suppress the video. A court put an early end to that inept coverup. A commission of inquiry was established once the public was able to see clearly that the RCMP were incompetent and reckless at the scene and dishonest afterward.
The Braidwood Commission found that the officers conspired to tell a false story, including that Dziekanski was standing up after the initial Taser shots, not already on the ground. That’s disturbingly similar to the false testimony given in Toronto.
A judge later found that all four RCMP officers on the scene “patently lied” under oath at the commission. All four were charged with perjury; two were convicted and two acquitted.
That Northrup died that night while on duty is tragic. His massive funeral honoured a man who served in uniform, generously contributed to his community and was loved by his wife and three children.
Det. Const. Northrup’s fellow officers should have honoured him by telling the truth about how he lived, and not by lying about how he died.
EYEWITNESS EVIDENCE IS NOTORIOUSLY UNRELIABLE.