Martensville payment raises "red flags" | Sterlings settlement | John Gormley | Geoff Dufour | Frank Quennell | Saskatchewan appeal intervention | Dueck walks

Sermonette, November, 2004

Can Justice Minister Quennell take a few more steps? The Prosecutors' office is still harbouring crowns who put the administrative of justice in disrepute

Every time this story or some aspect of it is told, we are reminded that one of the accused was found guilty.

It is rarely pointed out that Travis Sterling was almost certainly not guilty. His legal aid hired lawyer failed to provide a defence to one of the crimes he was charged with, leaving a loop hole for the jury to come back with one conviction on one person. Because the lawyer failed to raise a proper defence at trial, and because there was little appetite for such a thing, Travis's conviction was not appealed and he did his time in jail.

As with David Milgaard (who, as we will discover in the inquiry into the circumstances of his conviction if it ever happens) Travis had inadequate and incompetent counsel -- or, as I thought at the time, a deal had been made with the Crown to save face.

This was the most expensive criminal trial ever conducted in Saskatchewan and it would have been shocking if they had not obtained at least one conviction. We now learn that the Sterlings received slightly more than a car and a pizza while lawyer Geoff Dufour got almost three quarters of a million. To be saved the hard work of taking this slam dunk case to civil trial, Dufour spared the Prosecutor's office of having two more of its loyal officers of the court, Bruce Bauer and Leslie Sullivan, seen above flanking Richard Quinney, from facing further findings of malice.

(Today the Sterlings released a statement defending Dufour's entitlement to such a large piece of the action, saying he had many other expenses. The point the Sterlings make is that they are relieved to have their names cleared, and that must certainly be a relief to them. If Dufour told them that his expenses were so high, they must have accepted what he said at face value. Either that or Dufour was ripped off by the lawyers he farmed the work out to.)

When announcing the settlement, Frank Quennell continued to refer to the child complainants as victims. They were victims of zealous questioning first by RCMP Const. Claudia Bryden and then by sick social workers. They were victims of attitudes in a strongly fundamentalist religious community. The men who were boys when they testified against the person who was a youth in 1992 have a lot on their conscience. They were monsters created by the Crown Prosecutor's office which was, until last year, led by Quinney.

Gary Parker, the prosecutor who not only went after the Vopnis but threatened Rebecca Vopni with contempt of court for including in her Christmas letter to friends an explanation of why their five adopted children were no longer with them, is still working the boondocks, prosecuting anything he can find which can't fight back.

As well as the Vopni family, Parker participated in the persecution of the Campeau family, interrupting the white men rape trial in Tisdale to announce that the victim (a real victim in this case) had her father's DNA in her panties. I'd sure like to see that DNA lab. I'd like to see the chain of custody on the evidence. Never mind, Gary Parker is out there, far from the watchful eye of anyone who can scrutinize his activities or bring him to account. I was so troubled by this last Christmas eve I wrote a sermonette. There is a Crown appeal on this case and a Native women's group from Prince Albert has been given limited intervenor status.

Quennell still hasn't completely "got it." The Vopni family had their children removed and asked leading questions in 2001. The techniques used to interview the Vopni children were not reformed; rather they were refinements of the kind of manipulation used to get "evidence" from the Ross children in the Klassen/Kvello affair and the spoiled brats who testified against the Sterlings.

When the media first confronted Saskatoon Police Chief Sabo with the fury of his rank and file regarding the suspension of Brad Senger and Larry Hartwig, part of his response, and he was shaking as we watched him on television, was to state that he was, first and foremost a policeman. It was clear that he did not want his loyalties to be divided between being an honest cop and being an honest person. People within his own community, his own tribe, who were seeking to conceal the truth were tearing him in half. How can you serve and protect the citizens when you can hardly protect yourself?

Justice Minister Frank Quennell, by appealing the findings of malice against his prosecutor, Matt Miazga, has not yet faced that among his people, mostly honest lawyers employed by the Prosecutor's office, are also those who seek to conceal the truth and deceive the public? There is one prosecutor for sure, Matt Miazga, who was found to have acted with malice and illegal intent. There are more of them and they will feel free to continue undermining the whole justice system if Quennell doesn't turf him out. It is not Miazga's personal presence which undermines the system so much as that he is allowed to continue in his job. For Quennell to continue supporting him (by providing the means for his judgment of malice to be appealed) would be like Chief Sabo standing by Hatchen and Munson. Public officials, whether police or prosecutors, cannot continue to hold their jobs after they have been found to have acted criminally!--Sheila Steele, November 12-15, 2004

Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd.
William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell

Truth suppress'd, whether by courts or crooks, will find an avenue to be told. Sheila Steele, injusticebusters.com

If you hold the mouth of Truth, It will burst out its rib-cage. Somali proverb

Truth crushed to earth will rise again. --William Cullen Bryant

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Publisher Sheila Steele

Co-founder: Richard Klassen

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Our activism contributed greatly to the good vibes which happened around the civil trial.

Index to the stories on this website

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Index to Saskatoon Police stories

This is a pretty good scrapbook for the 1998-2002 period.

More Sermonettes

2001

January: Legal Treachery to keep Dueck's lies safe

2002

March, 2002 -- Gay Bashing still a legal sport in Saskatoon -- Even when it turns to murder

 

2003

 

Feb. 1: Where we stand

Feb. 15, 2003: Has Saskatchewan learned anything?

March 1: Connecting the dots

March 23, 2003: From Micro to Macro

March 25, 2003: About libel and malice

March 27: Gangs of Saskatoon: the police and prison guards

April 28, 2003: The Naked Truth

May 5: How low will they go?

May 15, 2003: Come clean Calvert, Cline!

May 30: Still smearing Milgaard - defamation is alive and well on the lawn of the Regina legislature and Precendent has been set as we reclaim our institutions

June 11, 2003: --Eric Cline carries on a corrupt tradition

Nov 7: Courage -- the only reward is justice

November 20: Just following orders

November 24: Mayor Atchison, community policing and graffiti

November 25: Michael Jackson

November 30: Corrupt officials must be severely punished: otherwise they just keep on putting the administration of justice in disrepute!

December 1: Christmas comes early for injustice warriors

December 4: Wide open Saskatchewan?

December 16: Crawling through the tunnel of justice since 1991

December 24: The Crown keeps right on breaking the law

December 30: Who will find justice under their tree?

 

2004

 

January 1. 2004: Unprecedented publicity and Happy New Year

January 8, 2004: Malice still afoot

January 10, 2004: Shame and mugshots

January 14, 2004: Telling more truth about the undefamable: McKillop and Quennell, the static duo

January 17, 2004: Fifth Estate returns and A working class hero is something to be

January 22,23, 2004: Justice is still prevailing -- it is just taking longer and Bits and pieces are now coming together to tell the story of the century

January 27, 2004: Telling the truth about the undefamable, restoring reputations to the defamed.

February 5, 2004: Negotiations and strategies: getting an intransigent government to remedy its damage

February 10, 2004: How many lawyers does it take to ruin a province? and Lawyer continues to treat people's lives as a cruel game: monopoly?

Febrary 16, 2004: Calvert is not King Arthur

March 29, 2004: Counting down to the damages trial

April 16, 2004: The internet, the courts and now the movies -- We will so what it takes to get justice

May 1, 2004: If Frank Quennell is any example of what former Justice Minister Chris Axworthy called "evolving," Saskatchewan is ready to kiss justice good-bye!

May 27, 2004: Some observations on Saskatchewan and justice

June 7, 2004:Media coverage of Monique Turenne's story illustrates journalistic laziness

June 8:, 2004 -- The police not only failed to serve and protect Don and Lorna Smith and their children but set them up for false charges and community shunning

September 2, 2004: A tale of three cops: Dueck, Gobeil and Schinkel -- with an update on how they get away with criminal obstruction of justice

November, 2004: Wilfred Hathway, Atif Rafay and Sebastian Burns -- RCMP stings offensive to community standards

November 11, 2004: Rogue Platoon? Identifying the rotten apples in Saskatoon Police Service and why we need a full public inquiry into our whole justice system

November 28, 2004: Can Justice Minister Quennell take a few more steps? The Prosecutors' office is still harbouring crowns who put the administrative of justice in disrepute

November 12, 2004: Saskatchewan Justice in chaos: The Stonechild report suggests it is.

November 28, 2004: The price for being a good judge or a good prosecutor

December 30: When the government interferes with the judiciary, we know a Police State is a dangerous possibility (The government appeal of the Klassen/Kvello decision)

 

2005

 

Jan 1, 2005: Chewed up digested and spit out

Jan. 5, 2005: More on chief Sabo

February 18, 2005: Tunnel vision: Darren Koehn, Wilf Hathway and Leon Walchuk

March 2: Fixing the system: Time to quit talking and implement previous commission recommendations

March 19, 2005 : Injustice as ShowBiz