Although the province has restored 34 full-time deputy sheriff positions that were cut last month, some rioters could end up walking free because of unreasonable delays due to a severe shortage of judges and supporting court staff.
In order to balance the budget, in May the government reduced the hours of 52 auxiliary deputy and part-time sheriffs, equivalent to eliminating 34 full-time positions. This resulted in at least 28 trials being cancelled or delayed throughout the province because deputy sheriffs were not on hand to provide security.
Those positions were quietly restored last week, but huge backlogs in the court system mean the move is not enough to deal with the volume of riot-related cases, says Leonard Krog, NDP critic for the Attorney General.
“A number of those will potentially end up walking because it will be such a delay between the time of laying the charge—if they don’t plead guilty, of course—and having a hearing,” says Krog.
In the last few years, numerous cases, mostly impaired driving and drug dealing, have been dismissed because of delays of up to two years, sometimes more, to get to trial.
It has come to the point that judges have been denouncing the situation in the course of their decisions in court.
“The backlog is so great and the courts so crowded that in many cases there will be an unreasonable delay should there be even one adjournment on a trial date,” Surrey Provincial Court Judge Peder Gulbransen said after tossing out charges against an impaired driver whose case took 32 months to get a trial date.
Although five new judges were appointed last fall, others have retired or died so the new positions only serve to “fill the natural attrition” without helping alleviate the problem, says Krog. The number of sheriffs has dropped from 525 a few years ago to approximately 385 now, primarily due to a hiring freeze.
In budget estimates last November, then-Attorney-General Mike de Jong acknowledged the problem and committed to ensuring that adequate resources would go toward addressing the judge shortage.
But earlier this month, Attorney-General Barry Penner said there is no more money available to deal with the issue. It costs a hefty $1.6 million to maintain one judge in court, along with support staff, for a year.
‘Justice Delayed’
Last September, Provincial Court judges released a report titled “Justice Delayed” which found the number of sitting judges has decreased by 12 percent—17 fewer judges—since 2005, despite a growing caseload and increasingly complex trials. A further loss of the equivalent of 4.95 judges is anticipated in 2011, the report said.
With fewer judges and support staff and rising case loads, courts are unable to keep pace with the new cases being presented to it, according to the report.
Darryl Plecas, a professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University College of the Fraser Valley, says chronic underfunding of B.C.’s justice system is the cause of the case backlog, which was greatly exacerbated by the government’s decision to close 24 courthouses across the province to meet 2002/03 to 2004/05 budget targets.
“That was just plain stupid and that stupidity has not been fixed yet,” Plecas says.
“We don’t have the capacity in the courts—there’s not enough court rooms, there’s not enough judges. There’s not enough people there to handle the volume and that’s been the case for a long, long time.”
Although major criminal trials involving organized crime have not been dismissed because of delay, Plecas fears that day will come—as it did in Quebec on May 31 when a judge threw out charges against 31 Hell’s Angels’ members because their trials would be delayed for too long.
Justice James Brunton feared the suspects would not receive a fair trial. All those charged with criminal offences have a constitutional right to be tried within a reasonable time, as ruled by the Supreme Court of Canada.
The 31 suspects were among 156 alleged members and associates of the Hells Angels biker gang who were rounded up in a massive police crackdown in 2009 following a 17-year investigation.
Brunton criticized Quebec’s justice minister and director of criminal prosecutions for assuming the province’s already strained court system could handle such a large case.
Plecas says in B.C., both the courts and police have been screening out cases for more than a decade.
“Police decide that there’s no sense even bringing it forward because the courts can’t handle it anyway. It’s a terrible situation and I would say right now it is one of the single biggest problems with our criminal justice system.”
Something that has helped take the pressure off the system, however, is a policy in which impaired drivers are given 24-hour suspensions instead of having their cases go through the courts.
“That has helped immensely in terms of freeing up court time, because that was a huge part of why courts were getting plugged up,” Plecas says.
Dean Purdy, chair of the B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union’s Corrections and Sheriff Services component, welcomes the restoration of the sheriff’s hours, but says more needs to be done.
”While the restoration of hours is good news in the Lower Mainland, the government still needs to look at hiring more sheriffs. Staffing in Victoria has been a particular problem,” he says.
B.C. Conservative leader John Cummins is calling on the government to “restore all the cuts to the justice system made over the last three years, including the prosecutors cut in 2009. Without prosecutors, sheriffs, and other courtroom staff, trials can be delayed or thrown out, resulting in criminals being let free.”
