RCMP Watch

Tom Zytaruk (Surrey Now) - A knife fight between two married cops spawned a series of acrimonious litigations that included allegations of negligence and malicious prosecution against a third cop who investigated the assault.

The case centred on a knife fight between two married officers in their home in 1994. Both parties - Patrick Reilly, of the Burnaby detachment, and wife Kim Reilly, of the Surrey detachment - sustained knife injuries.
Langley RCMP Corporal Paul Marcel Bissonnette investigated the case. The court heard that both husband and wife gave conflicting stories, with Mr. Reilly claiming his wife attacked him from behind and slashed his face. Mrs. Reilly, on the other hand, suffered cuts to her forearms and hands and claimed they were defensive wounds. She also claimed she managed to wrest the knife from her husband and he was injured when she was defending herself.

Bissonnette arrested Patrick Reilly the next day for assault with a weapon and assault causing bodily harm.
One day after that, Mr. Reilly was suspended from duty with pay and in the following year was committed to trial on both counts. After the trial, he was acquitted on both counts and soon after that launched a legal action against Corporal Bissonnette and the provincial and federal Crown, claiming malicious prosecution.

Patrick Reilly claimed Bissonnette was asked to do a blood-spatter analysis of the scene and an analysis of the blood on his clothes, but he didn’t. Further, the plaintiff claimed the corporal, despite instructions from a superior officer, failed to obtain a forensic pathologist’s report to see if the injuries matched the conflicting stories.

The court heard that a pathologist report, provided after the trial despite a number of inquiries by Bissonnette, found the injuries to Mrs. Reilly didn’t appear consistent with a knife assault by her husband, but that the “weight of probability” suggested her cuts were self-inflicted.

The pathologist found Mrs. Reilly’s injuries “are not typical of defensive wounds” and were “all consistent with self-inflicted wounds and may have been added post-conflict.”

A RCMP sergeant out of Saskatchewan subsequently investigated Bissonnette’s investigation and found it “flawed and incomplete.”

Patrick Reilly claimed damages against Bissonnette, with the defendant arguing that a claim for malicious prosecution shouldn’t rest with a cop because the Crown is responsible for laying charges.

The judge dismissed Reilly’s claim, finding the necessary elements for a claim of malicious prosecution had not been proven.

Reilly then launched an appeal, while the defendants sought to have a negligence claim dismissed.
“I would allow the plaintiff’s appeal and remit the claim for malicious prosecution to the trial court,” BC Appeal Court Justice Lance Finch decided. “I would dismiss the defendants’ cross-appeal and affirm the order that the negligence claim proceed to trial.”

“Only when the available circumstantial evidence was obtained could an informed decision be made on whether the evidence of the plaintiff or Mrs. Reilly was likely to be believed and hence whether there were reasonable and probable grounds for charging the plaintiff,” Finch maintained. “It was unfair to decide that issue without such evidence, when it was known to exist, or to be obtainable.”