(CBC News) – A senior RCMP officer in B.C. says he is standing by a controversial email he wrote about the police use of Tasers on Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport two years ago.
RCMP Chief Supt. Richard Bent told the Braidwood inquiry into Dziekanski’s death that he wrote the email shortly after speaking by phone to the supervisor of the officers involved in the incident.
Dziekanski died in October 2007 after being shot five times by RCMP officers with a stun gun, then left handcuffed face down on the floor of the airport’s arrivals lounge.
The inquiry resumed Tuesday after a three-month delay to allow the contents of an internal RCMP email to be examined.
The November 2007 email, from Bent to assistant commissioner Al McIntyre, suggests the four Mounties who responded to the airport call discussed, before they arrived on the scene, a plan to use a Taser against the Polish immigrant.
“Finally, spoke to Wayne and he indicated that the members did not articulate that they saw the symptoms of excited delirium, but instead had discussed the response en route and decided that if he did not comply that they would go to CEW,” Bent said in the email.
The “Wayne” in the email is Supt. Wayne Rideout, then head of the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team looking into Dziekanski’s death. CEW is short for a conducted energy weapon, the RCMP name for a Taser-type weapon.
The revelation the email existed halted inquiry proceedings in June just as summations were to begin.
‘We’re going to deal with it’
The email appears to contradict the statements of the four officers involved in the incident at Vancouver International Airport. They testified in the spring that they didn’t have a plan before reaching the scene to use the stun gun on Dziekanski.
Inquiry commissioner Thomas Braidwood has scolded the RCMP for failing to disclose the email sooner.
“I was critical back in June because that email we should have had,” inquiry lawyer Art Vertlieb said. “The more important thing is we’ve got it and we’re going to deal with it.”
Vertlieb has acknowledged the comments on the email are hearsay but he said they must be investigated since they’re from senior RCMP.
“On its face, the email appears to tell a significantly different story,” he said.
The three RCMP officials cited in the email are expected to tell the inquiry the email was the result of a misunderstanding.
The four officers who were at the airport have already appeared before the inquiry and are not scheduled to appear again.
“There is not a single shred of evidence to support the assertion made in Chief Bent’s email,” said lawyer David Butcher, who represents Const. Bill Bentley.
Officers not facing charges
The RCMP has produced about 18,000 new documents since June.
Walter Kosteckyj, the lawyer representing Dziekanski’s mother, said he’ll consider asking the inquiry to call back the four officers if he thinks there are unanswered questions.
Crown prosecutors have decided not to charge Bentley, Const. Gerry Rundel, Const. Kwesi Millington or Cpl. Benjamin Robinson in Dziekanski’s death.
“Based on the assessment of evidence I’ve seen to date, I haven’t seen much else,” Kosteckyj told The Canadian Press. “The only thing that has to be explained is why does a person who is in command write that kind of an email. When I take a look at how quickly (the Taser) was used, I have a hard time believing that it wasn’t discussed.”
Vertlieb said final arguments will likely finish by mid-October.
Anecdotal evidence has its place and can be either discounted or instructional depending on the veracity and specifics of example. It should not be summarily dismissed without examination. Indeed, legislation is enacted in part due to it.
Witness the minefield of the impaired driving milieu. An area strewn with ridiculous case law. Easy to blame the police officer for taking X minutes too many to read the demand after forming reasonable and probable grounds to do so, and toss the case, when in actuality it is nonsensical to bow to that argument. Little comfort to the affected innocents in an accident/fatality situation. The “rough hewn” version would be to establish the physical signs of impairment, blood alcohol level and be done with it. In this area the dearth of convictions should be indicative of something other than to blame the police.
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1) I am well aware of the unfathomable volumes of reading that disclosure/discovery can produce, much to my own chagrin.
2) You are making an assumption that I find chain-saw carvings a substandard form of art. On the contrary, I find chain-saw carvings very appealing but very different from a Rodin work; this is precisely why I chose the analogy.
3) I won’t get into the “grasp of the law” issue as it would primarily be supported by anecdotal evidence which, as we can both admit, is hardly proof of anything.
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It is reasonable to assume the reasonable people can discern relevancy, regardless of profession. However, the slippery slope argument so often used by the legal community is not recognized in its own domain. Therefore, you end up with such decrees as I mention about BC Rail. There is a point to rulings such as Stinchcombe for criminal matters or Guano civilly, but the absurd lengths that disclosure is taken to is, at times, extreme and of no value.
The first paragraphs should have been instructive for you in the sense of scale in some of the disclosure issues that happen every day.
Your analogy is insulting to the police officers of which you obviously have a low opinion about. Most seasoned police officers have a better grasp of the law than most lawyers. The fact that the navigation of our laws is strewn with roadblocks and contradictions is not the fault of the police, but of the legal establishment in its quest for their clients. Decisions today are overturned on a regular basis. Actions supported today in some levels of the Courts are summarily banished at the appeals level. Witness R vs Crocker and the subsequent appeal for just such a case.
You may wish to ask yourself if perhaps the “roughly hewn” approach is the better angle than the contradictory, self serving, ebb and flow of who has the better lawyers.
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Hmm… I don’t know if your first three paragraphs are argumentative or just there as filler. Kindly note the fourth sentence of para. 1 in my original post where I implicitly acknowledge that the number (18,000) may be overkill. I am well aware of the requirements as stipulated in the famous Peruvian Guano case.
With regards to the BC Rail issue, it is a criminal matter and subject to slightly different rules. Not to mention that the relationship between the appointed prosecutor and the RCMP is very different when compared to the relationship the Braidwood DOJ lawyers have with the RCMP as an organization.
But, in the same vein, is it reasonable for any of us to assume that a Mountie (or any other police officer) has the ability to ascertain the relevance of a document when they have not been trained as or to think like lawyers? I highly doubt it; from what I have witnessed, time and time again, the average Mountie has a tough time navigating the actual law and usually prefers a roughly hewn conceptual framework instead. Think of it as the difference between Rodin and a chain-saw carver from Hope.
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Hardly. The key question is relevancy, not quantity. One could presume that the DOJ lawyer missed the email in question because of so much fodder demanded in this instance.
The question of relevancy is sometimes lost in the unholy zeal for “everything”. You will find that in the disclosure, any document that has the word airport or Dziekanski, or any such reference would be in the mass of paper. Such is the nonsense at times that counsel wants an accounting of the repair records to cars driven in the particular police detachment because one may have driven to the scene of an accident his client was involved in.
In the BC rail debacle the RCMP sent a directive out to every police officer in the RCMP in the entire province looking for any reference to the names involved or the words BC Rail. Such was the hysteria there.
I am not surprised that Supt Rideout’s testimony was such that Dick Bent got it wrong. The excruciating minutiae raised to that level in authority is ludicrous and this is a prime example of how they should have allowed the empowered personnel handle the affairs without their interference.
Don’t hold your breath on any discipline for the DOJ lawyers involved. Posters on this site regularly skewer the RCMP for “covering their ass” and like actions. The RCMP are amateurs compared with the DOJ and the legal establishment.
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18,000 new documents disclosed since June? That’s a huge number. That’s an embarrassing number. I hope, for the sake of the RCMP and the DOJ, that this number is artificially large out of an abundance of caution; otherwise, it just looks like the RCMP/DOJ were playing silly bugger with disclosure rules – a big no-no in the legal community.
It will be interesting to see if anybody files a complaint with the LSBC over DOJ lawyer conduct. LSBC discipline digests always make for very, very interesting reads.
I’m looking forward to Wayne’s testimony. Word on the street is that Wayne’s a decent fellow and I’m excited to see what a decent fellow looks like in this whole affair.
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