People living in rural Canada may have reason for special concern about a controversial recent decision of the Supreme Court.
By a vote of four to three, the court overturned a B.C. man’s murder conviction on the grounds that evidence against him had been improperly obtained since police entered his home without a search warrant.
Many people who get their knowledge of the justice system by watching U.S. television shows will see nothing remarkable in the court’s ruling.
In fact, however, it represents increased Americanization of the Canadian legal system, moving it further toward U.S.-style restrictions on the admissibility of evidence.
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The circumstances of the B.C. murder case also suggest this approach could handicap police trying to apprehend violent criminals in rural areas.
After an 86-year-old man was beaten to death with a crowbar in 1991, RCMP from Williams Lake had to drive more than an hour to reach the scene. They went to call on a man who had been seen walking in the vicinity.
When the man, who had been drinking before the crime, didn’t respond to a knock on the door, police entered and found him asleep in a blood-stained shirt. The victim’s money was found under a mattress. Police soon established that the bloody fingerprints in the victim’s home and stolen vehicle belonged to the suspect.
The suspect was eventually convicted of murder, but the conviction was overturned when the Supreme Court ruled that police should have first obtained a search warrant. Previously, court rulings allowed police to enter without a warrant if they had reasonable grounds to arrest a suspect.
While obtaining a warrant can presumably be done quickly in a large city, police in the B.C. murder case were in a different situation. It would have been a two-and-a-half-hour round trip for them to return with a warrant, ample time for a criminal to wash up and dispose of blood-stained evidence.
Rural residents, like other Canadians, would not want police to be able to enter their homes on a whim. But they also wouldn’t want to have violent criminals living nearby who escape conviction because police have to drive an hour for a warrant.
In addition to the question of when a warrant should be required, there is also the issue of whether objective physical evidence should ever be ruled inadmissible. If police obtain such evidence improperly, then they deserve appropriate punishment, ranging from a reprimand to criminal charges depending on the circumstances.
But courts should not create the legal fiction that the evidence doesn’t exist.
