City judge mourned

A prominent member of the legal community in Prince George and northern B.C. died Monday following a long bout with cancer.

Darrell O'Byrne had been a provincial court judge based in Prince George since August 2005 and prior to that was a practising lawyer in northwest B.C. for 25 years.

"He was a very hard working judge that really understood the people of the north," colleague Michael Brecknell, a provincial court associate chief judge, said Tuesday.

"He lived up here for a great many years representing all sorts of different people in just about every town in northern B.C. and certainly as a judge he sat everywhere in the north."

During his time in Prince George, O'Byrne heard hundreds of cases covering a wide range of allegations - from drunk driving to drug dealing to serious assaults. He had a knack for cutting to the chase, according to local lawyer and Prince George Bar Association president Garth Wright.

"One of the things I always admired about Darrell was he was very good at coming quickly to the point," Wright said. "He could focus in on what's the key issue or set of issues in this proceeding and say 'let's deal with that,' and that's important in a courtroom, particularly provincial court."

O'Byrne's notable decisions included sentencing Timothy Shawn Preddy to nine years in prison for the confinement and torture of two women in Valemount. That decision was given in Port Coquitlam after Preddy was deemed too high a security risk to be transported back up to Prince George following his escape from the Prince George Regional Correctional Centre.

O'Byrne also once commented that a photo of a crack-addicted thief holding a seven-inch hunting knife against the throat of a taxi driver was the "most frightening thing I have ever seen" before sentencing Donald George Witso to four years in jail.

And in issuing 14-month jail term to man who ran an extensive marijuana grow operation near Hixon, he dismissed any consideration of a conditional sentence in favour deterring others from committing the same crime.

"You play the game, you pay the price," O'Byrne told Phuc Van Vo during sentencing.

During the two years he was an administrative judge for the Cariboo region, O'Byrne was known to not have much time for bureaucracies and lived by the maxim that is was better to make a decision and ask for foregiveness after the fact than to seek permission beforehand.

"He was very much a person who, if something needed to be done, he'd get on with doing it as opposed to spending a lot of time in meetings talking about doing it," said a colleague who asked not to be identified.

After graduating from law school at the University of British Columbia, O'Byrne was called to the bar in 1980. Following articles and a brief stint in private practice, he moved to Terrace where he worked at the Crown Counsel office for about two years.

In 1983, he became partner in Halfyard, O'Byrne and Wright where he continued in that firm until 1992. That year he started practice with his wife Irene Peters and continued to work on criminal, youth and family matters.

He also acted as a guest lecturer at Northwest Community College and in 2004 was elected as a bencher for the Law Society of B.C. for the Prince Rupert County.

When health concerns forced him to step down in April of this year, O'Byrne was hearing a case against four men - Michael Andrew Joseph Fitzgerald, Francois Christiaan Meerholz, Dillan Meerholz and Craig Anthony Niedermayer - accused of committing a drug-related kidnapping and torture of a man blamed for the loss of marijuana from a grow operation in Salmon Valley.

A new trial before another judge began in July and is currently in hiatus until next year due to scheduling conflicts and the time it has taken to hear testimony and arguments.

When he was not working, O'Byrne had a penchant for singing and was a member of a local choir.

"He was known, from time to time when he was golfing with his friends or his three brothers to occasionally start singing from something like Pirates of Penzance or My Fair Lady to sort of distract the fellow from his swing," Brecknell said. "He had to do that because he was not a very good golfer - he thought he was, but he wasn't."

O'Byrne served the court and the people of the province "with great compassion, dedication and distinction," provincial court chief judge Thomas Crabtree said in a statement. "He contributed in many ways to the life of the court including as an administrative judge, at education conferences and on the judges association executive."

A funeral service will be held this Saturday at First Baptist Church at Fifth Avenue and Gillett Street, starting at 2:30 p.m. The family is asking that donations be made to the Prince George Hospice Society in O'Byrne's memory.