A case against a Prince George man accused of accessing and possessing child pornography has been stayed after a B.C. Supreme Court Justice found police lacked sufficient information to obtain a search warrant for his home.
In a reasons for judgment issued this week, Justice Ian Meiklem agreed with defence counsel's argument that police acted on an effectively anonymous tip and lacked the corroboration to meet the threshold for reasonable and probable grounds to conduct the search.
As a result, Meiklem concluded the accused's charter rights were breached and any evidence found at the scene could not be admitted into the trial. The charges were stayed on Monday.
According to Meiklem's ruling, Prince George RCMP had acted on information from the Vancouver Police Department, who in turn had received a tip on May 1, 2008 from a complainant who had been on a gay chat site when a person with the handle "zapattack" told him he had a 14-year-old boy available for sale for sex and was staying at a downtown Vancouver hotel.
The complainant relayed the information to a VPD dispatcher but a search of hotels in the area failed to turn up the boy. However, the e-mail address associated with the handle was traced back to the accused's address in Prince George and was used on the day in question.
Prince George RCMP subsequently obtained a search warrant and seized evidence from the home on July 4, 2008.
Details on what police found was not provided in the ruling but in addition to the child porn charges, the man was also charged with unsafe storage of a firearm and possession of a prohibited weapon without a licence.
Meiklem noted that none of the offences the accused was charged with were related to the May incident. Rather, he was charged with accessing child pornography between June 1 and July 2, 2008 and the three other charges were dated July 4, 2008.
Although the complainant gave his name to the VPD, defence counsel argued that the call was "analagous to a Crime Stoppers tips and, absent any corroboration, does not meet the threshold of reasonable and probable grounds to believe."
Meiklem agreed, noting that although the complainant identified himself, he declined to provide a written statement or become further involved.
"Plausible excuse or not, this is tantamount to remaining anonymous," Meiklem said and went on to say there was no further evidence to show "zapattack" had visited the chat site on the date in question "or any other specific date."
Once the investigation's focused shifted from searching for the boy to tracking down the identity of "zapattack," Meiklem said there is no evidence police asked the complainant to provide a copy of his own computer records and the complainant could have done so without compromising his confidentiality and providing a written statement.
"One wonders how the evidence is expected to be on [the accused's] computer if it is not on [the complainant's]," Meiklem said.
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