February 11, 2013 edition of The Toronto Star, by Betsy Powell

Why would a drug dealer leave seven kilos of methamphetamine, worth $300,000, sitting on the back seat of his car overnight in a downtown Toronto parking lot when he knows he’s being followed by police?

The question is one a defence lawyer is asking Superior Court Justice Michael Dambrot to consider when he decides whether her client, Velle Chanmany, 32, is guilty of possessing the drug for the purpose of trafficking.

“This was a man who was so paranoid of being followed that he ate, or destroyed, a phone chip so police could not get his contacts,” Leora Shemesh said Monday during closing arguments.

“He knew he was being followed and he knew the vehicles associated with the police,” she said.

The defence is alleging that Toronto police officers – Rick Shank, Glenn Asselin and possibly others – “diverted” seven kilos of meth from an earlier seizure into Chanmany’s vehicle on May 8, 2008.

The officers were working on a covert, joint-forces operation called Project Blackhawk and were frustrated that after two years, and numerous attempts, they were unable to get any evidence that Chanmany was selling illegal narcotics. He testified during the trial he sold cocaine but not meth.

A week before Asselin reported finding the meth inside Chanmany’s car, Shank stopped two men in a van leaving a suspected meth lab, Shemesh said. Shank discovered 52 kilos of meth in the rear, which he loaded into the trunk of his vehicle.

“He then lets the two men go. No one is charged. And no one is ever found again,” Shemesh told court.

Dambrot, who is hearing the case without a jury, said he found it “very puzzling” that Shank would find such a large amount of drugs, then “casually let them go.”

But he also asked, “where’s the logic” in Shank instantly dreaming up a scheme of using the drugs to frame Chanmany, and wondered if it wasn’t illogical that Chanmany left $4,000 in his car that night if he feared police might break in and take it.

“All the logic doesn’t run one way,” the judge said. Police reported seizing only $1,800, though Chanmany is overheard on wiretaps complaining that police had taken $4,650 from a black satchel hidden beneath the driver’s seat.

During her closing submissions, Crown attorney Sarah Egan told Dambrot the Crown doesn’t have to disprove the “irrational or fanciful” conspiracy theory.

“The Crown is not required to disprove conjecture,” she told court.

Allegations that Shank “secreted” away seven kilos “is unsupported by any evidence” and there is no proof of police misconduct, she said. Egan said the meth seized by Shank was later handled by the clandestine lab unit officers.

Egan added the traffic stop may seem “unusual” but “in the context of this investigation there were numerous stops conducted like this,” she told court.

Dambrot will release his ruling April 5.

For some police officers and Crown attorneys in the Greater Toronto Region, defence lawyer Leora Shemesh is public enemy No. 1. She has built a reputation ...

February 17, 2012 edition of The Toronto Star, by Betsy Powell

Leora Shemesh, flanked by a mugshot of Frank Sinatra in her College St. office, is a tough-as-nails defence lawyer whose hardball tactics in the courtroom have made her many enemies among Crowns and the police. – Colin McConnell/Toronto Star

For some police officers and Crown attorneys in the Greater Toronto Region, defence lawyer Leora Shemesh is public enemy No. 1.

She has built a reputation alleging officers lie in court to support the charges they have laid.

Ninety per cent of her caseload is drug prosecutions, heavily dependent on police witnesses, search warrants and wiretaps. She is relentless when cross-examining police, especially when she suspects the police have side-stepped the law.

“I find certain police officers find it comical that I get so angry in court,” Shemesh says. “They smile and seem to get a kick out of it.”

Outside court, there are no smiles from her targets or adversaries.

One Crown called Shemesh a “lying piece of s—.” In another case, a police officer called her a “bitch” during a break in proceedings.

“Some say if you’re pissing people off you should wear it like a badge of honour,” Shemesh says. “I’m not sure what to make of that.”

Last week, her full-frontal attack on the conduct of Peel Region police officers against her cocaine-dealing client led a judge to deliver a scathing rebuke to the force’s drug squad. Superior Court Justice Deena Baltman found the officers beat Tan-Hung Dinh, searched his home illegally, then lied about it all in court.

Police officers, Shemesh claims, believe the law “essentially handcuffs them and is designed to preclude them from catching the bad guys.”

Her zeal to challenge authority took root in a suburban Thornhill household. “A very principled man,” Shemesh says of her father, Joe, who left Israel for Canada, where he prospered in oil and real estate despite lacking a formal education. An “advocate of the underdog,” he would write letters over things some might consider trifling, such as an unexplained three-cent bank fee. There were lively debates at the dinner table.

Shemesh was a competitive figure skater before giving up her Olympic dream and hunkering down in school, eventually landing at Osgoode Hall law school in Professor Alan Young’s first-year criminal law class.

“She stood out in the first week because she challenged me on some issue,” says Young, co-founder of the school’s Innocence Project, which investigates wrongful convictions. “It’s rare that early on in law school, but cooling her jets is not Leora’s nature.”

Shemesh says she embraced criminal law the moment the Young walked into class. “I was sold with his fake vomit and Chinese slippers.” (The vomit was a prop used to illustrate the subjective nature of what a disgusting object is; the slippers his signature footwear.)

Young said Shemesh has “enormous energy and enthusiasm and became a well-seasoned veteran early on. She will not concede unless she has to. That has earned her a reputation as a fighter – and you start to get enemies. It’s not a popularity contest, and when people talk behind your back then you’re having an impact.”

Called to the bar in 2001, Shemesh, 36, runs defences that push the envelope. She once argued that York Region police violated a drunk driving suspect’s Charter rights by forcing her to remove her underwire bra at the station because it could be used as a weapon.

It was a humiliating experience, Shemesh argued, challenging a constable on the witness stand “to find one occurrence involving someone attempting to hang themselves with an underwire bra.”

The judge didn’t buy Shemesh’s argument and convicted the woman. She’s appealing.

Standing up to police officers – the ultimate male bastion – comes at a price, Shemesh says.

Last week, at the College Park courts, Shemesh told a judge a number of off-duty Toronto police officers had come to court “to intimidate me.”

The Crown attorney laughed it off with the comment: “Shemesh, you eat nails for breakfast.”

(Most days, in fact, her breakfast consists of an English muffin in the car after getting her two daughters dressed for school. “That is a bigger negotiation process then a plea on a gun,” she says.)

Shemesh insists she found the police presence “really freaky,” adding, “they wouldn’t do that to a male defence lawyer.”

A senior police officer, told of Shemesh’s concern, accused her of grandstanding. “Oh please. Leora Shemesh isn’t intimidated by anybody, especially police officers.”

Shemesh, however, says the fact she is “hated” by cops, crowns and, she’s certain, some judges, isn’t something she shrugs off.

“My husband (boutique owner Ariel Benaich) always asks, ‘Why do you care what people think?’ I just do.”

She once “bawled her eyes out” after a Court of Appeal justice peppered her with questions, she rendering her mute despite the fact she’d “lived and breathed that file.” She remembers her colleague leaning over afterward, saying: “Not as easy as it looks, eh?”

Tough as she has become, Shemesh credits her husband for keeping her fighting spirit intact. “He is a wonderful man, who lets me have and be in the spotlight without any reservations or insecurities. He is my number one fan – next to my dad and mom of course – and he cheers me on always.”

When she believes an injustice has occurred, she channels her outrage by writing letters to the Prime Minister, the attorney general or public prosecution services “just to get someone to do the right thing.”

She’s disappointed, but not surprised, when she receives no response and is chagrined about the lack of support or empathy she encounters in non-legal circles.

“If I hear one more person say to me at a party, ‘How do you sleep at night?’ I am going to scream.”

By: Timothy Appleby and Kim Mackrael

A group of Peel Regional police officers “essentially colluded and then committed perjury en masse,” in their handling of a drug case that began more than two years ago, a judge has found.

Tan-Hung Dinh, now 28, was arrested and charged with possession for the purpose of trafficking after a 2009 sting operation at a Mississauga motel. Police said they found nearly a kilo of cocaine in Mr. Dinh’s car and another two kilos when they searched his house.

Although Mr. Dinh pleaded guilty to trafficking the cocaine found in his car, an Ontario Superior Court Justice ruled on Friday that he will face no jail time, in part because the officers who arrested him and searched his home violated his Charter rights. The judge said the offence would normally result in a sentence of five to eight years.

“The police showed contempt not just for the basic rights of every accused but for the sanctity of a courtroom,” Justice Deena Baltman wrote in giving her reasons for Mr. Dinh’s conditional sentence. She said the officers’ misbehaviour “strikes at the heart” of justice administration and undermines society’s confidence in police and the courts.

In early September 2009, an undercover police officer arranged to meet Mr. Dinh in a motel room, ostensibly so the officer could buy a large quantity of cocaine. When Mr. Dinh arrived, he was pulled inside the room by several officers and beaten, the judge found.

Mr. Dinh told court that five or six officers punched and kicked him for about two minutes, and that at one point one of them climbed up onto the nightstand and tried to jump on him (he rolled clear). They also interrogated Mr. Dinh without a lawyer and ignored his requests for medical attention, the judge found.

The officers denied using any more force than was necessary to make the arrest.

After finding nearly a kilo of cocaine in Mr. Dinh’s car, several officers searched his house without a warrant, where they found two more kilos, together with an ecstasy-pill press, more than 2,000 grams of ecstasy and assorted drug paraphernalia.

When drug-trafficking charges were subsequently laid, Mr. Dinh sought to have them stayed, on the grounds that his Charter rights had been violated.

“He has always admitted that it was his drugs. This case was never about whether they belonged to him,” Mr. Dinh’s lawyer, Leora Shemesh, said on Friday. “For my client, it was about [the fact that]they violated [his]rights by the way in which they dealt with him.”

Last fall, Judge Baltman ruled that she would not stay the charges, because they were too serious. At the same time, however, she said the evidence found in his home was inadmissible because police had not obtained a search warrant first and subsequently lied about it in court.

The officers said they found the drugs in Mr. Dinh’s home only after obtaining the warrant, a claim the judge said was “designed to mislead the court.”

She concluded that Mr. Dinh’s rights had indeed been disregarded, in three different ways.

First, the level of force used by police in the motel room was “excessive.”

Second, Mr. Dinh was denied access to a lawyer after he had been grabbed and dragged inside the motel room, and it was not clear that statements he made there were given voluntarily. As such, they were deemed inadmissible as evidence.

Third, Peel police had no search warrant when they descended on his house. In some circumstances, a warrantless search is legally permissible, the judge noted, but this one was not.

On Friday, Judge Baltman handed down a conditional sentence of two years less a day, with the first year to be spent under house arrest.

Judge Baltman said she recognizes that police have to exercise discretion in difficult and changing circumstances, but said in this case, the officers’ treatment of Mr. Dinh and their decision to lie under oath was “calculated, deliberate and utterly avoidable.”

Mr. Dinh has been under house arrest for the past two and a half years. He had no criminal record before the offence, has complied with his bail conditions and maintained a job, factors the judge said also played into her decision to issue the conditional sentence.

After a publication ban was lifted in the case Friday afternoon, Peel Police Chief Mike Metcalf announced that an internal inquiry into the actions of the five officers, launched last September by the Professional Standards Bureau, was under way and would continue.

In the meantime, all five remain on active duty, Chief Metcalf said in a news release.

February 10, 2012 edition of The Toronto Star, by Betsy Powell

A photograph of Tan-Hung Dinh shows obvious bruising suffered in what an Ontario Superior Court justice ruled was an unprovoked beating by Peel Region police who arrested him for drug trafficking.

Peel Region Police say they are conducting an internal investigation after a judge’s damning words about the “reprehensible” conduct of members of their drug squad. But critics are skeptical anything will be done.

“The police lied under oath in order to cover up (an) illegal search and persisted in their lying when confronted with the most damning of evidence. All these misdeeds were calculated, deliberate and utterly avoidable,” Superior Court Justice Deena Baltman said Friday in a Brampton courtroom, reading out her reasons for sparing a baby-faced cocaine dealer a prison sentence.

“The police showed contempt not just for the basic rights of every accused but for the sanctity of a courtroom,” said Baltman, referring to four officers from the force’s drug and vice unit, who are involved in a multitude of other narcotics cases in Peel.

If perjury charges are laid and the officers convicted, then all investigations would probably be tainted and charges stayed, legal observers say.

But defence lawyer Leora Shemesh says previous judicial findings of misconduct by Peel police have been ignored and she doubts this case will be different.

“Since last September, Internal Affairs has had a formal finding from a Superior Court judge who concluded the officers’ conduct was reprehensible and should be addressed,” Shemesh said.

“Nothing has happened. No charges have been laid and internal affairs appears to be asleep at the wheel.”

Shemesh represented Tan-Hung Dinh. On Friday, the 28-year-old avoided prison after Baltman found Peel officers beat him, searched his home illegally and then came to court and lied about it.

After a pre-trial Charter motion ruling released last September, Baltman cited police misconduct as the reason for excluding all evidence seized from Dinh’s home, including two kilograms of cocaine, an ecstasy press and 2,000 grams of ecstasy.

The officers involved “essentially colluded and then committed perjury, en masse. This must be addressed in a concrete way,” she wrote in her 38-page decision of Sept. 28.

A publication ban covering the ruling was lifted Friday after Dinh pleaded guilty to a remaining charge of trafficking nearly a kilo of cocaine found in the trunk of his car.

Minutes after Baltman spoke, Peel Police Chief Mike Metcalf issued a statement saying he ordered an internal investigation after learning of Baltman’s comments last fall.

“Allegations made against members of this service are taken seriously and will be investigated thoroughly,” he said.

The officers remain on active duty pending completion of the investigation.

Two Peel internal investigators were in the court Friday. They refused to acknowledge who they were or make any comment when approached by a Star reporter.

Baltman said she was deviating from a prison sentence range of five to eight years typical for trafficking in that amount of drugs because of the “serious police misconduct involved.”

She sentenced Dinh to a two-year conditional sentence, with the first half to be served under house arrest.

Prosecutor Surinder Aujula, who told court “significant factors can be found for a (sentence) reduction in this case,” asked for a two-year custodial sentence but said the Crown was not opposed to two years less one day, allowing for a conditional sentence.

Dinh has been living under strict house arrest without any breaches since he was released Sept. 11, 2009, Baltman noted. The automotive technician has no criminal record, has strong family support and appears to have been drawn into a drug subculture.

He admitted to brokering a cocaine deal on Sept. 9, 2009, when he was duped into meeting Const. Ian Dann, posing as a customer, at a Super 5 motel room in Mississauga.

Dann, along with constables Jason Hobson, Jay Kirkpatrick and Steve Roy, were inside the room. Other officers set up surveillance outside.

Dinh arrived in the parking lot, walked to the room and knocked on the door, where officers were waiting.

But when his drug trafficking charges got to court, Shemesh applied to have the charges stayed or evidence excluded. She alleged there were numerous Charter violations during the arrest.

Last summer, the judge heard evidence, including the testimony of Dinh and the officers. Baltman found a “gross disparity” in their descriptions of what happened.

Dinh testified he was pulled into the room by several officers, pushed onto a bed and beaten.

The officers denied any undue force was used, nor did they observe any injuries to him.

Citing photographs of his injuries, and evidence of his doctor, the judge sided with Dinh, saying the officers could not explain the bruises in the photos.

“Police used unwarranted physical violence against a fully cooperative subject,” she wrote in her September ruling.

Baltman added that while she found it “impossible” to determine how the injuries were caused and by whom, she was satisfied one of more of the officers “deliberately and unnecessarily injured Mr. Dinh.”

She also found other Charter breaches and excluded the drugs found in the residence.

But Baltman did find that the cocaine police obtained from his vehicle was admissible, so he faced a trial.

Dinh admitted his involvement and agreed to plead guilty but felt he needed to “tell his story,” Shemesh told court. “He has always been very clear about why he is here and what he expected out of our judicial system,” she said.

“He is settled with the fact that he is being punished for his poor behaviour and he is settled that the judical system proceeded fairly in its assessment of the conduct that was perpetrated against him.”