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Monday, October 13, 2008
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Vcr police lawyer says racism allegations in freezing death not based in fact |
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Written by Camille Bains, THE CANADIAN PRESS
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Thursday, 15 May 2008 |
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VANCOUVER - A lawyer for the Vancouver Police Department says allegations of a coverup and racism in an aboriginal man's freezing death have rocked the force.
In testimony before a public inquiry Thursday, Sean Hern blamed a senior lawyer from the Office of the Police Complaint Commission for taking the Frank Paul case "wildly off course," including at a legislative committee hearing.
Hern told the public inquiry into Paul's death that lawyer Dana Urban's comments that police were racist and that Paul was treated like a pile of garbage created a negative perception about the police department, both within the aboriginal community and within the general public.
"The (department) bore the collateral damage from those comments," Hern said about the 2002 hearing at which the allegations arose.
Paul was found dead of hypothermia on Dec. 6, 1998, after a police officer dumped him in an alley.
Const. David Instant had picked Paul up for drunkenness and transported him to the city drunk tank, where the sergeant refused to admit Paul, saying he wasn't drunk.
Hern said that while the Paul family's lawyer, Stephen Kelliher, has criticized the police investigation, Paul's death was considered suspicious from the start, involved homicide investigators and included a report to Crown counsel.
"It was not a sham as Mr. Kelliher has described it," he told the inquiry.
Hern also said the Office of the Police Complaint Commission "inflated and exaggerated" comments made by a pathologist when it said he suggested Paul could have been dead before he was dumped in the alley.
Rex Ferris testified earlier that he couldn't remember if he said that at a November 2000 meeting with Urban and another commission staff member, but the comment was not in a report he'd submitted to the commission.
But Hern said Ferris's "throw-away comment" was considered new evidence by current police complaint commissioner Dirk Ryneveld. He included it as new evidence in a January 2004 report calling for a public inquiry into Paul's death.
Hern said the suggestion that Paul may have died in the police wagon created the "collateral damage" for Vancouver police and further sullied the force's reputation.
But lawyer Frank Falzon, who represents Ryneveld, said the police department never raised any concerns about the suggestion in the four years before the inquiry began.
Falzon accused Hern of being "reckless" by suggesting the police complaint commission was "manufacturing evidence."
He said the most catastrophic piece of evidence against police was their own video recording showing a helpless Paul being dragged in and out of the drunk tank.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 08 October 2008 )
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