Criminal Brutality by Police goons takes 14 years
to disclose, and still no appropriate charges! Probe puts blame on Police in
brutal death of Aboriginal teenage boy.
[warning:
Autopsy photo in second story (below) is graphic in nature.]
Neil Stonechild
In his final report, Justice David Wright concluded
there's evidence that Stonechild, who was found frozen to death in a field on
the outskirts of Saskatoon in 1990, was in police custody the night he was
last seen alive. Marks on his body were likely caused by handcuffs, the judge
found.
Stonechild's body was discovered five days after a friend said he saw him
sitting in the back of a police cruiser, bloodied and calling for help.
The original Saskatoon police investigation in 1991 was brief. It concluded
the aboriginal teenager died while trying to walk to an adult jail to turn
himself in for being at large from a youth home.
Police claimed they had no contact with Stonechild the night he disappeared.
INDEPTH: The Neil Stonechild inquiry
The case was largely forgotten by many for a decade – until two aboriginal men
were found frozen to death in a field on the outskirts of Saskatoon within a
week in 2000.
A third man survived and told a tale of being driven to the field by Saskatoon
police officers, who left him there to find his way back to the city.
Saskatchewan's justice minister asked the RCMP to reopen the investigation
into Stonechild's death.
That investigation concluded there was not enough evidence to lay charges.
However, accusations that police abandoned him sparked the provincial inquiry
into the teenager's death and how the subsequent investigation was handled.
INDEPTH: Who was Neil Stonechild?
At the inquiry, two Saskatoon police officers implicated in the case denied
even seeing Stonechild the night he disappeared. However, Stonechild's friend,
Jason Roy, testified that he saw a terrified Stonechild in the back of a
police cruiser the night he vanished.
Autopsy photos of Stonechild's body showed marks across his face that
correspond to the shape of a handcuff.
Wright's report concludes that the two Saskatoon police officers – constables
Larry Hartwig and Brad Senger – did respond to a call involving Stonechild the
night he was last seen alive and took him into custody.
Wright also chastises Sgt. Keith Jarvis, the officer in charge of the initial
investigation, for dismissing important information about the case, such as
Roy's report that he saw Stonechild in the back of police cruiser the night he
disappeared.
The inquiry's report makes eight recommendations including:
Attracting more aboriginal candidates to municipal
police services in Saskatchewan.
Making it easier to complain about inappropriate
behaviour by police.
Better in-depth training on race relations for
police officers.
Review the anger management and dispute resolution
courses police officers take.
The $2-million inquiry heard from 43 witnesses over 64 days of hearings, which
wrapped up last May.
Betty Ann Adam. The StarPhoenix, September
24, 2003
The coroner who was
called to the scene of Neil Stonechild's frozen body didn't order an inquest
even though he had many questions that were not answered by a police
investigation.
"He wasn't on the road and clearly this
isn't an area where people normally go walking in that kind of weather," Dr.
Brian Fern told the commission of inquiry looking into the 1990 freezing death
of the Saulteaux youth.
"This seemed a strange place to be. So there
were questions there to be asked. How did he get there? Why was he not on the
road side?"
Fern said he expected the police to
investigate the death and eventually communicate their findings to him. They
never did and no inquest was called.
Fern acknowledged, under cross-examination
by Silas Halyk, lawyer for the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations, that
as coroner, he was responsible for deciding whether an inquest was necessary.
It was his responsibility to answer the
questions of the cause of death and the mode of death.
Fern was shown an autopsy photo of
Stonechild's face and the same picture with handcuffs superimposed over two
diagonal lacerations on the nose.
He said it was possible the lacerations
could have been made by the handcuffs and that slight deviations in the
otherwise straight lines could have been caused by movement of the face as
pressure was applied or by the nose being compressed.
"As an ordinary layman, it was an obvious
deduction," he said.
The picture of handcuffs over the nose marks
"might well have" had a significant effect on his conclusions if he had seen
it in 1990, Fern said.
The marks could also have been made by
fingernails and a thumbnail or by the frozen stalks of weeds found in the area
of the body, he said.
The weeds seemed unlikely to Fern, who said
he thinks the lacerations were made some time before Stonechild's death
because of the way the blood had dried.
Under cross-examination by Donald Worme,
lawyer for Stonechild's family, Fern acknowledged there were also unanswered
questions about why the 17-year-old had only one shoe and why the sock on the
unshod foot was worn out through the heel and blackened near the ball and
toes.
Fern did not order any tests to determine if
there was any trace amounts of blood or other bodily fluids on Stonechild's
clothing.
He never asked the police to explain why the
questions were never answered.
There were no formal guidelines from the
chief coroner's office dictating when an inquest should be called, other than
a statutory requirement for one when an individual dies while in custody. Each
of the province's approximately 200 coroners used his or her own discretion in
calling inquests, he said.
The chief coroner at that time was Dr. Diane
Stephenson, who discouraged inquests because they were "not free," Fern said.
The operation was in a phase of transition
away from coroners having authority to call inquests and toward today's more
formal procedure in which the chief coroner's office makes the decision, he
said.
Budgetary constraints were mentioned more
than once during Fern's testimony. He said that in 1990 he was paid $70 per
case for each coroner's case he took regardless of how much work it required.
That fee has risen to $100 per case today, but Fern noted it costs him $150
per hour just to cover overhead at his medical office.
Such financial constraints on himself and on
police may have prevented them from doing "a crackerjack" job, he said, noting
that things like extensive laboratory tests are costly.
Fern's original information for the death
certificate showed Stonechild died from exposure "due to or as a possible
consequence of being inebriated." He also noted beside the word "violence" the
word "undetermined."
However, Fern did not include that much
detail on the official death certificate that was submitted to province's
vital statistics branch; that one gives the cause of death as "accidental,
exposure" and includes a note stating "tests suggest he was mildly
inebriated."
The difference wasn't because he had changed
his opinion about the death, he said.
"I'm quite sure I would have written
'undetermined" if I had given it more thought," he said.
Meanwhile, Fern said it was odd that the
toxicology report he ordered was sent to the police before it was sent to him.
"It was a case of interest to them for some
other reasons," Fern said.
The toxicology report showed a blood alcohol
level of 150 milligrams per 100 milliliters of blood, or almost twice the
legal blood alcohol level for driving. There was no sign of any other drug
use.
After Fern was excused, the commission
brought back Rene Lagimodiere, a retired police officer who was the first
person to the scene after two workers in the north industrial area discovered
the body on Nov. 29, 1990.
Worme cross-examined Lagimodiere on
testimony he gave Monday, pressing him on why he appeared to dismiss the
oddities of the death without at least requesting the opinion of the area
sergeant, whom he could have consulted.
"You exercised discretion away from calling
an investigator," Worme said.
Lagimodiere said that although he did not
ask dispatch to send the patrol sergeant, dispatch could have sent him anyway.
It would have been up to the patrol sergeant to call a major crimes
investigator.
Lagimodiere acknowledged that there were
peculiarities that could well have justified his asking the patrol sergeant to
come and take a look, such as why the victim was in the area with no obvious
transportation, why was he missing a shoe, where was the shoe, where did he
walk to make his sock so dirty, how did he get the two lacerations across his
nose and other scratches on his cheek?
He also acknowledged that he didn't
investigate the tracks in the snow to try to figure out just where the victim
walked and where the workers who found him had walked. Nor did he search the
parking lot or road for footprints or signs of a vehicle stopping to eject the
person.
Lagimodiere has said he followed police
service policy of not requesting a patrol sergeant, who would have decided
whether to call an investigator because there were no obvious signs of foul
play.
"I wondered how he got out there but, again,
that's not cause for believing there's some foul play involved," he said.
"What would he need?" Worme said.
"Would he need a bullet wound in him? Would
he need a knife in his back? What would have been a real obvious sign of foul
play?" Worme asked.
"I don't know. I can't answer that,"
Lagimodiere said.
"You exercised that discretion in favour of,
because there is no blood, there's no axe in him, no knife in him, there's no
bullet wound . . . dismissed the fact he's found out in the middle of nowhere
with one shoe on, with no other reasonable explanation for his being there,
you exercised discretion away from calling an investigator."
Lagimodiere said he thinks the patrol
sergeant did come to the scene. He was also confident that other investigators
would continue with the case.
VANCOUVER — A
Mountie in Merritt, B.C., has been charged with torture — the
first time a Canadian police officer has faced such a charge.
Const. Saxon Peters has already been
charged with aggravated assault, unlawful confinement and two
counts of obstruction of justice in connection with the
alleged beating of an aboriginal man on Aug. 25, 2005.
It’s alleged Peters took 25-year-old
Glenn Shuter for a ride on the outskirts of town, where he beat
him and left him.
But on Monday, Crown prosecutor Stephen
Harrison dropped the unlawful confinement charge and replaced it
with the Criminal Code offence of torture.
Harrison also received approval from
the Attorney General’s Ministry to proceed by direct indictment.
That means Peters, who is on unpaid
suspension, will go directly to trial without a preliminary
inquiry.
Peters is accused of beating Shuter,
who he suspected of stealing another officer’s bicycle, and then
leaving him to walk 10 kilometres back to town to seek medical
help.
Shuter allegedly suffered injuries to
his head, face and stomach.
In an interview with The Vancouver Sun
in September 2005, he said the beating lasted several minutes
and ended only when he spit out blood and broken teeth and
begged the officer to get off him.
“It was crazy. I was worried I was
going to die,” Shuter said.
Harrison refused to comment Tuesday on
why he decided to charge Peters with torture, saying detailing
the offence “would be inappropriate given the matter is before
the courts.”
Arthur Dick, chief of the Lower Nicola
Band, told Global TV that the incident turns his stomach.
“I’m just flabbergasted, you know, I
just don’t know what to say about that,” Dick said.
Shuter never filed a complaint
against the RCMP but only reluctantly revealed the details of
what happened to a senior Mountie more than a week after the
incident occurred.
[It is worth highlighting the fact that the
victim did not file a formal complaint. Most assaults by police are
never reported, because the police intimidate their victims with threats
if they complain, and victims generally have no confidence a system
controlled by people known to be mostly supportive of their criminal
conduct.]
Inquiry into death of homeless native man [Frank Paul] comes seven years late.
Watch below video and see if you can spot which cop is lying on the stand.....
War crimes expert, Dana Urban, gives his testimony.
Vancouver, B.C. (Canadian Press) - The Vancouver police department was involved in a coverup in its handling of the case of an aboriginal man who froze to death after being dumped by police in an alley, a lawyer for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association charged Friday.
Mike Tammen told an inquiry into Frank Paul’s death that the head of the police internal investigations section, Insp. Robert Rothwell, failed to take responsibility for finding out if Paul’s family was misinformed about his death.
The inquiry has heard Paul’s relatives in Maine and the community of Elsipogtog, N.B., where he grew up, were told the homeless man was hit by a cab and that his body was found in a ditch a month later.
However, the family was never told Paul was in police custody just before he died.
“We were at a loss as to how the family came to that conclusion,” Rothwell told the inquiry.
“I wasn’t micromanaging the investigation,” he said, when asked about why there was such a lack of information in the file about his section’s probe. [full report]
Even women in the RCMP seem to lack that special
quality we call "empathy".
Sent: Wednesday, January 03, 2007 8:33 AM
Subject: RCMP apologizes for holding native suspect naked in a lockup
for two days last winter in Labrador
RCMP apologizes for holding suspect naked.
Last Updated: Wednesday, January 3, 2007 | 8:45 AM NT CBC News
Police
in Labrador have apologized to a woman who was held naked in a lockup
for two days last winter, and have disciplined an officer for
mistreating her.
An internal RCMP report has found that police did not follow procedure
in a case involving Carol Ikkusek, 26, who was kept naked in a small
lockup cell that had no mattress.
Ikkusek was stripped and left to sleep on a steel bench with no
blanket. Ikkusek was given a blanket after 16 hours, but she
remained naked for another day and a half.
The RCMP's internal review found Tuttle did not do enough to reassess
the status of the prisoner.
Details of Ikkusek's treatment surfaced last winter during a sentencing
hearing.
Insp. Greg Bursey made an apology on Tuesday to Ikkusek, on behalf of
the force's Labrador district.
"I'm sorry she felt that she was mistreated in any way or put through
any undue hardship, but certainly there was no intent," Bursey said.
How could there be no intent? The RCMP were
in total charge of the facility, and are directly responsible for the
health and safety of those in their custody! Or are we rather to assume
that the RCMP is in the habit of hiring people so out of touch with
reality, that they can't imagine anyone needing a comfortable and warm
place to sleep? Is that really a compelling reason to retain their
services?
"I'm satisfied that within reason that it shouldn't happen
again."
Tuttle was disciplined for not following procedure. She still works
with the RCMP in Happy Valley-Goose Bay.
Meanwhile, Boyd Rowe, chief executive officer of the regional health
authority, says there's a need for more secure medical holding areas
"More and more, we are utilizing that particular secure room, and
it has led us to give some thought to designating another space within
the facility," Rowe said.
Nobody with the Ikkusek family could be reached to comment on the police
report.
Police recommend women lock themselves in their homes to "defend" themselves.
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