Guilty verdict in girl's death should be stayed over delay: lawyer

The lawyer for a man found guilty of killing a 13-year-old Burnaby girl is asking a judge to stay the jury's verdict over unreasonable delays in getting the man to trial.

Ibrahim Ali had been in custody and charged with first-degree murder for more than 63 months by the time his trial ended, which his lawyer Kevin McCullough told a B.C. Supreme Court judge on Tuesday is more than double the allowable threshold set out by the Supreme Court of Canada.

McCullough brought the socalled Jordan application before the court in an attempt to stay the proceedings against Ali on the grounds it took too long for their client to get to trial, a limit Canada's high court has set at 30 months.

If granted, Ali would go free without sentencing.

Ali, who appeared by video wearing an orange sweatsuit and medical gloves, was found guilty on Dec. 8, less than 24 hours after jurors' deliberations began. He faces a mandatory life term with no chance of parole for 25 years.

The body of the girl, whose name is covered by a publication ban, was found in Burnaby's Central Park in July 2017, and he was charged about one year later. There were about three years of pretrial proceedings before Ali entered a plea of not guilty on April 5, 2023.

The Jordan application was filed on Dec. 7, before the jury began its deliberations, McCullough said Tuesday.

Ali had several other defence lawyers before McCullough and his co-counsel Ben Lynskey took over the case in 2021.

In his arguments Tuesday, McCullough said many of the adjournments in the years after Ali was charged were due to case mismanagement by the court. While there was some unforeseen delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he said much of the holdup stemmed from the Crown providing “trickling disclosure” to the defence, something he noted the judge had flagged to prosecutors in 2019.

McCullough also pointed to the Crown's 14-month delay in filing Ali's direct indictment after his arrest, which is meant to accelerate the trial process by skipping a preliminary inquiry for the accused.

“The ceilings in Jordan, I'd argue, are meant to be upper limits. Any trial lasting that long is presumptively unreasonable,” he said. “I say the Crown naturally bears the burden of rebutting that presumption.”

The only way the Crown can rebut that is to “establish exceptional circumstances” that it could not “reasonably mitigate,” McCullough said.

The Crown couldn't do that in this case, he told the judge.

“My overarching point is that this is not a complex case.”

McCullough focused on an adjournment application previous lawyers requested in August 2020, saying that was the turning point. He noted that after the application was denied, that defence team stepped down, citing “ethical reasons.”

“The net result of declining the application rather than attempt to solve the problem so obviously was going to cause this case to be over 30 months and well over the ceiling,” McCullough said. “To simply make no effective inquiry, to make no effort to case manage (or) to solve the problem was going to cause the delay that would result in a new defence team 23 months in, but it also deprived the accused of the defence team he had been working with.”

The Crown has not yet made its submissions in the application.