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Police can ignore accused's right to silence: top court Police have the right to continue interrogating criminal suspects,
even after suspects have asserted their constitutional right to silence
and refused to answer questions, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled yesterday. Published: Friday, November 02, 2007 The decision fortifies police investigative powers across the country, and upholds the conviction of a British Columbia man who killed an innocent bystander when he fired his gun into a crowd outside a strip club in Surrey, B.C., in 2002. One prominent defence lawyer predicts the ruling will embolden police and contribute to Canada's poor record of wrongful convictions. "Things are going to get worse for people in custody," says Frank Addario, president of the Ontario-based Criminal Lawyers' Association. "We have a short memory in this country of how wrongful convictions are constructed. Coercive police tactics are part of the problem, and the court should be drawing a line in the sand, not tolerating them." However, yesterday's decision was not unanimous. Four of the nine justices argued instead that a suspect's right to silence is a "constitutional promise that must be kept," and police must cease their questioning once the right has been claimed. At the centre of the case is the killing of Rick Lof, a 30-year-old Canadian who lived in Hawaii. Mr. Lof was in Canada to celebrate a friend's birthday on April 5, 2002, when he was randomly struck in the head by one of five bullets fired into the entrance of a strip club by Jagrup Singh, then a 28-year-old truck driver. Mr. Singh fired shots into the bar after he and two others had been thrown out of the club. Mr. Singh was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 13 years. He appealed his conviction all the way to the Supreme Court, insisting that a key piece of evidence -- an admission to police that he was the person in a videotape image recorded at the bar on the night of the shooting -- had been improperly obtained. Upon his arrest, Mr. Singh was advised of his Charter rights and allowed to speak to a lawyer. He repeatedly told police that he did not want to talk about the incident, and asserted his right to silence 18 times. In spite of this, the interrogator continued to question the detainee, in what the trial judge described as an "effort to get Singh to confess, no matter what." During these sessions, Mr. Singh identified himself as the man in the videotape, a piece of evidence that contributed to his conviction. The Supreme Court found the trial judge was correct in allowing the admission to be shown to the jury, because even though Mr. Singh had asserted his right to silence, the interrogation was not so aggressive that Mr. Singh was intimidated or browbeaten into identifying himself as the man in the video. The law giving an accused the right to remain silent does not mean "that a person has the right not to be spoken to by state authorities," says the majority ruling, written by Justice Louise Charron. Judge Charron dismissed a request from Mr. Singh's lawyer to impose a rule requiring police to stop interrogating detained suspects the moment they assert their right to silence, and only to begin questioning again after the suspect has signed a waiver. That "proposition ignores the state interest in the effective investigation of crime," writes Judge Charron. "Provided that the detainee's rights are adequately protected, including the freedom to choose whether to speak or not, it is in society's interest that the police attempt to tap this valuable source (of information)." The dissenting opinion, written by Justice Morris Fish, takes the opposite view: "I am troubled by Justice Charron's suggestion that the ability
of the police to investigate crime in Canada would be unduly impaired
by the effective exercise of the pre-trial right to silence," Judge
Fish writes.
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