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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (10688)	12/8/2010 10:53:32 AM
From: average joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 69300

$3.2M in drugs inadmissible in Sask. case B.C. man stopped by RCMP on Trans-Canada Highway Last Updated: Tuesday, December 7, 2010 \| 8:28 PM CST CBC News Cocaine and marijuana with an estimated street value of up to $3.2 million can't be used as evidence because of an illegal search in the case of B.C. man accused of drug trafficking, a Saskatchewan judge has ruled. The decision, published Tuesday in legal databases, concerns the RCMP search of a modified motor home June 13, 2007, on the Trans-Canada Highway near Moose Jaw. Officers stopped Gerard Stephane Turpin around 2:15 p.m. because his motor home, travelling from Vancouver to Thunder Bay, Ont., strayed six times across the shoulder line on the highway. Initially, an RCMP officer thought Turpin may have been drinking. However, while asking for the man's driver's licence and registration, the officer did not notice any signs of impairment. Instead, he grew suspicious because the man appeared to be nervous. The officer then decided to see if the motor home's vehicle identity number had been altered. The officer then read the wrong number and assumed something was amiss. "Having misread the label and because of 'the driver's nervousness and previous record,' [the officer] decided to arrest him for possession of stolen property," wrote Justice Dennis Ball of the Regina-based Court of Queen's Bench. But the police were not finished. Suspicious fabric softener odor Another officer who arrived to assist detected the smell of fabric softener in the motor home and thought it may have been used to mask the smell of drugs. A sniffer dog was brought in and the animal detected something at an air vent. With that, police probed further and discovered the motor home had been extensively modified with secret compartments. They uncovered a 45-kilogram stash of cocaine worth $1.1 million to $2.5 million, 118 kilograms of marijuana valued at $471,000 to $733,000 and two bundles of $20 bills totalling $3,080, found under a shelf in a cupboard. But the judge said in his 17-page decision that the evidence had to be excluded. He said the officers violated Turpin's charter rights in the search because they "did not have reasonable and probable ground to believe the motor home was stolen." Officer 'flagrantly negligent' "He [the officer] had not carried out even a cursory investigation into the possibility that it might have been stolen," Ball said. "His inability to compare the two clearly matching vehicle identification numbers, if not the result of wilful blindness, was at least flagrantly negligent." The judged said the drug evidence was strong and an argument could be made to admit it into the case, but he concluded that would not be in the best interest of justice. "Admitting the evidence in these circumstances would amount to a judicial declaration that, in the administration of criminal law, the end justifies the means if the offence is serious and the evidence is reliable," Ball said. Neither the man's Vancouver lawyer nor the Crown prosecutor could be immediately reached for comment. cbc.ca