The head of the provincial prosecutor’s bureau has ordered an extension of the internal investigation she requested last year to find out why prosecutors failed to disclose evidence to defence attorneys in a high-profile murder trial of five Hells Angels.
Last fall the jury trial, part of Operation SharQc, a major investigation into the biker gang, was aborted after the presiding judge ruled prosecutors had held back on turning over a key part of their evidence for years.
Annick Murphy, the head of the Directeur des poursuites criminelles et pénales (DPCP), initially ordered an administrative investigation, headed by Jean Lortie, a former prosecutor and former deputy minister with the Quebec government, on Oct. 16. At the same time, Murphy said she would consider making Lortie’s findings public. Lortie submitted his conclusions to Murphy on Dec. 18 but little has been said since.
The trial was aborted several weeks after a jury began hearing evidence and that was preceded by several months where pretrials motions were heard in court, at great expense to Quebec taxpayers. One of those motions involved repeated demands from defence lawyers to have access to evidence that the Crown only turned over after the trial well well underway.
On Wednesday, Murphy issued a release stating she has asked for more information before making any decision on what Lortie learned.
“This step will allow a good comprehension of the sequence of events that held back the (disclosure) of evidence in this (case). Therefore, the administrative investigation is still ongoing,” Murphy said in her statement.
On Oct.9, the presiding judge in the jury trial, Superior Court Justice James Brunton, ordered the stay of proceedings on seven first-degree murder charges and a conspiracy charge after ruling the four years it took for the prosecution to finally disclose key evidence was an abuse of procedure. In his 17-page decision, Brunton criticized the prosecution for its “desire to win at all cost.” The evidence included information from police informants that provided a completely different portrait behind who was involved in one of the murders compared to the version the Crown was presenting to the jury.
