Judge refuses to return $75,000 seized from apartment
A judge has refused to return $75,000 in cash that was seized by police from a Vancouver apartment and that the B.C. government claims was proceeds of crime.
The provincial director of civil forfeiture wants to retain the money that was found by police in an apartment at 8488 Cornish St. where Paige Montanna Judd was living on Feb. 8, 2019.
After B.C. Supreme Court Justice Miriam Gropper granted a temporary order preserving the money in June, the director went back to court seeking the continued preservation of the funds pending the outcome of the forfeiture proceedings. Judd sought the return of the funds, claiming that they represented her life savings acquired from tips that she earned while working as a server for many years and was untainted by crime. She also complained about the conduct of police and the director and alleged that in seizing the money, the police had violated her charter rights.
Gropper found the director met the legal test for a preservation order after noting that police found the cash, mostly in $50 and $100 bills, strewn about the floor after they breached the door of her suite that her boyfriend, known to police as a drug dealer, had barricaded.
The boyfriend, who is facing trial in February, appeared to be under the influence of drugs at the time and had apparently ransacked the apartment. A police officer gave an opinion that the bills tested positively for cocaine residue and whoever had been handling the money before it was seized must also have been handling cocaine.
Judd argued that the officer's affidavit was deficient for a number of reasons, including that it did not have all of the required features of an admissible expert report.
But in his ruling, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Warren Milman concluded the affidavit evidence was admissible. He said Judd's explanation for the money was
“fraught with enough problems” that it could not be said to negate the existence of a serious issue to be tried. Milman noted that Judd claimed that when she was working three years earlier, she used to take her tips to the bank to trade them in for the $50 and $100 bills found in the suite.
“For the past three years, she says she” stored my money in my apartment in a safe spot, “so that it was available to her to pay expenses, such as rent,” said the judge.
“If the money had indeed been kept in such a `safe spot,' it is not clear to me how it came to be strewn about the floor on Feb. 13, 2019.”
Also problematic was that when police asked her how much money there was, Judd responded that it was close to $40,000, much less than the amount seized, said the judge.
“If that money did indeed reflect her life savings, as she maintains, one would have expected her to have a better sense of how much she had managed to save over the course of her life.”