Chris Gardner (iNews 880) – The RCMP denies it spent $2 million dollars on the Mayerthorpe Mister Big undercover operation.
Since Dennis Cheeseman and Shawn Hennessey had their day in court and pleaded guilty to reduced charges of manslaughter, there have been complaints of police entrapment.
RCMP spokesman Corporal Wayne Oakes strongly rejects that but says the criticism is not unexpected …
“In a lot of cases, you know the families has to stand behind their loved ones. The evidence, unfortunately, speaks for itself.”
Oakes says the total cost to the RCMP from the first report of the Mayerthorpe area shooting; an investigation involving hundreds of police officers; the Mister Big operation and court preparation is about $2 million in total.
There have been 350 Mister Big operations in Canada up to the end of 2008 with Oakes claiming a 75 per cent success rate and a 95 per cent conviction rate.
“Mr. Big” Issues
“The question we have about Mr. Big is: ‘Is it a dirty trick?,”‘ said lawyer Daniel Brodsky, who is part of the Toronto-based Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted. For the past year the association has been reviewing Mr. Big cases with an eye on the reliability of statements made to undercover police.
Brodsky noted that police in the United States and the U.K. don’t use Mr. Big tactics because of the potential for false statements. “They don’t use it because they know it is so effective they will get a statement in every case. But they won’t necessarily be getting the truth. How do you tell whether it is somebody who has made up a statement in order to win a king’s ransom?”
Criminologist Rob Gordon said Mr. Big operations are an effective law enforcement strategy to glean intelligence and information about crimes.
The challenge is to ensure that statements from such operations are accurate and admissible in criminal cases.
“As an investigative tool it is very effective. If you go the next step and try to use it as evidence it gets wobbly,” said Gordon, a former police officer and director of the criminology program at Simon Fraser University. “People get caught up in the activity that they are alleged to be involved in,” he said.
“They want to be members of the group. And so to impress Mr. Big, or Mr. Big’s lieutenants, they will say things that are in effect not true. They may well confess to police officers who are role playing in the simulation that they have done this, that or the other, when in effect, they haven’t. They want to be accepted.”
RCMP declined to comment on their Mr. Big procedures or policies.
Brodsky said there is a place for such investigative techniques as long as there are proper legal safeguards. He said the justice system should come up with a procedure that would allow a judge to determine whether evidence gleaned from a Mr. Big operation should be put before a jury.
“When you use the Mr. Big technique you can’t ask the judge to look at it before the jury sees it because the Charter doesn’t apply and either does the common law,” says Brodsky, “There is no mechanism to challenge the reliability of the statement.”
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