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Editorial: What are our judges smoking?
Van Dung Cao was judiciously tending to his pot plants at his home on 157A Street, Surrey when police came knocking.
But they apparently did not wait long enough for the pot grower to open the front door before they busted into the house.
The cops, armed with a search warrant, found four rooms in the unfinished basement being used as a marijuana nursery.
The grow-op basement had 704 plants.
But never mind that, said British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Catherine Bruce.
“The actions of the police created a real risk of harm to an occupant by accidental shooting and to the police in terms of an aggressive response to the violent entry,” she said, before dismissing the marijuana as evidence and letting the pot grower go free.
Welcome to our court system, where the rights of criminals get better protection than the safety of cops.
A court system which says it guards the administration of justice, but in fact is doing the opposite with its absurd decisions.
Justice Catherine Bruce is not the first to beg the question — what are our judges smoking?
In northern B.C., a major international drug investigation went bust after a court allowed three suspected traffickers to go free following a massive police operation.
The judge said RCMP investigators spied on the crime syndicate illegally and the surveillance tapes, if allowed in court, would taint the justice system.
Six months before that case, another multi-million dollar investigation into an Asian drug cartel — so powerful that police said it could stockpile heroin and dictate the street price of the drug in North America — collapsed in Victoria.
Its members, who had connections to underground banks in Hong Kong and the poppy fields of Burma, included some of Asia’s most wanted. One of them, a loan shark banned from B.C. casinos, was even brazen enough to have his picture taken with the former premier, Glen Clark, while seeking to open a casino.
Not long after that case against him collapsed, the loan shark and his family were busted yet again for running another drug operation in Richmond.
They were contract killers, counterfeiters and heroin importers working in an organization whose tentacles reached around the world.
In Edmonton, two massive court cases stemming from a massive drug sweep linked to the Trang syndicate, crumbled because the judge said police took too long to provide copies of evidence.
Costs to police, lawyers, and Alberta Justice in that file alone was some $36 million.
Similarly, a mega-trial in Winnipeg involving 35 alleged members of the Manitoba Warriors street gang also collapsed. This was a test case involving Canada’s anti-gang legislation.
The annals of organized crime in Canada are littered with these decisions where our judges, who in their unabashed desire to maintain so-called judicial integrity, have lost their reality checks.
If the reaction to Justice Bruce’s decision is any yardstick, the public is of the opinion that our judges are unable to strike a proper balance between fighting crime and protecting the rights of the individual.
Maybe the time has come to look at electing our judges to inject the justice system with a sense of realism and accountability.
You will be surprised at how many Canadians think that time has come.
A poll by Strategic Counsel last year 63 per cent support the idea of voters choosing judges — including 24 per cent who “strongly” endorsed it. That compares to 30 per cent who oppose it and just 11 per cent who strongly oppose it.
Our sitting judges of course think it’s a horrific idea open to abuse which will lead to campaign finances dictating rulings.
But this could be checked with a level of federal and appellate judges being appointed by the government.
None of our federal parties currently support a shift to elected judges
You could start that ball rolling with a call to your MP.
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