Police "Corruption"

"When a police officer is charged, the prosecution effort that is put in is enormous. I don't know of anything that equals it. Allegations of police misconduct and crime are obviously very serious, but compared to other crimes, unsolved murders ... I think people would be very surprised. They just kept going and going, looking under every rock."
Harry Black, Toronto lawyer defending Const. Steven Correia

Five former Toronto drug squad officers have had the time of their lives.  In an entirely, life-disrupting, negative way that none of them might have suspected they would undergo, when they decided to undertake a search of a heroin dealer's apartment without bothering to wait for a lawful warrant.  Taking the law into their own hands, as it were.  Assuming that because they were law enforcement, and with good reason to enter the confines of a private dwelling where a criminal resided, all would be forgiven.

It is ill-thought-out consequences like this that end up with evidence, wholly incriminating, being tossed because 'illegal' means were used to secure evidence that would put in jeopardy the ongoing activities of some of society's worst criminals.  Their rights, under the law, having been trodden upon.  And their activities, victimizing society, are placed second to the rights of the criminals. But of course, meant for the protection of all society.

Toronto Police Association President Mike McCormack spoke of the five police officers as having boarded "the ship of the damned".  The men, he said, "were judged and convicted years ago in the court of public opinion.  You can't beat the conspiracies; it's just the reality of the world we live in."  And the reality of the world inhabited unwillingly by John Schertzer, Steven Correia, Ned Maodus, Joe Miched and Raymond Pollard left them with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Rules and regulations, they now know of a painful certainty, are not meant to be broken.  Irrespective of whom it is they protect.

The press had a rollicking good time indulging themselves in comments that "have amounted to hyperbolic vilification for conduct" quite surpassing the particular offences they were accused of, according to Judge Gladys Pardu.  A process which "constitutes an enormous deterrent to any officer tempted to cut corners or lie under oath."  Since 1998, the judge explained, the "catastrophic" proceedings had left the five men in "the crosshairs" of investigators determined to make an example of them.

All of the men, who were convicted by a jury last June of attempting to obstruct justice; three of them convicted as well of perjury, yet acquitted of other charges including those of fraud, assault and theft, were sentenced by Judge Pardu sympathetically to 45 days of house arrest. 

One could say with huge understatement that in the years between their hasty commission of the "crimes" attributed to them to the present, they had suffered more than adequately.

That warrantless search of a heroin dealer's apartment, and the subsequent attempts at cover-up, exacted a miserable toll on their lives and that of their families.  "There was nothing abusive about the manner in which the search was conducted and the occupants were well treated", said the judge.  "There is no doubt that they had grounds to obtain a warrant."  Yet she dismissed the notion of 'noble cause corruption', expressed as law-breaking for the purpose of apprehending the criminal.

Dozens of investigators were put to work full-time on the prosecution of these five unfortunate men seeking to do their job as public security officers in the business of apprehending criminals.  For their pains, all now suffer profound depression or anxiety,  aside from PTSD.  The internal charges under the provincial Police Act laid against the men in 1998 sealed their futures within the police force.

Five years earlier another Ontario Superior Court Judge, Ian Nordheimer - stayed all charges against the five men.  Critical of the impossibly slow pace of the prosecution, Judge Nordheimer's decision was, in any event, overturned at the Ontario Court of Appeal, when a new trial and ordeal ensued. 

The painstaking efforts to intrude into the personal lives of the accused by undercover agents to secure evidence to be brought in support of their prosecution was worthy of a search to uncover the identity of a mass murderer.

No illuminating light of justice seen to be done throws its warmth on this case.