- 注册
- 2002-10-07
- 消息
- 402,311
- 荣誉分数
- 76
- 声望点数
- 0
After eight years, a pair of trials where he was twice found not guilty and a trip to Canada’s highest court, an Ottawa construction worker accused of driving while impaired by marijuana has pleaded guilty to nothing more than a traffic offence.
It was the end of a long legal saga for Carson Bingley that started with erratic driving on Merivale Road in May 2009 and led to a Supreme Court decision that streamlined drugged driving trials, just as the country moves toward legalizing marijuana by next July.
On Monday, the 36-year-old pleaded guilty to careless driving under the Highway Traffic Act and was given a $1,000 fine and one year driving prohibition. Court heard he swerved through traffic, drove in an opposite lane and then hit a parked car in a nearby parking lot.
Bingley was originally criminally charged with driving while drug-impaired after allegedly failing a roadside sobriety test administered by a specially-trained and certified police officer known as a “drug recognition expert” or DRE.
MORE: With marijuana legalization, a new problem sprouts: How to test for high drivers
He was taken to the police station, where he then underwent a 12-part evaluation for drug impairment that measures things like physical coordination, eye movement, blood pressure, pupil size and muscle tone. The evaluation, which is used across North America and Europe, was added to the Criminal Code in 2008 by the then-Conservative government.
The results of Bingley’s evaluation – coupled with his admission that he had used marijuana hours earlier and taken two Xanax – led the DRE to conclude he was impaired by marijuana.
But as Bingley’s experience has shown, proving cases of impairment by drugs can be difficult. Unlike alcohol, there are currently no approved roadside screening devices to determine precise levels of drugs in one’s system. Nor are there currently any legal limits on how much of a drug is too much to drive a car.
In April, the federal government proposed new offences as part of Bill C-46 that will make it a crime to drive with more than two nanograms of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, per millilitre of blood. The legislation will also authorize police to use oral fluid drug screeners at the roadside to determine whether drugs are present in the saliva if they reasonably suspect a driver has been using drugs. However, prosecutions will still rely on the evaluation by a DRE at a police station or the taking of a blood sample.
Outside of court on Monday, Bingley insists he wasn’t impaired by drugs, which motivated him to keep fighting the charges for as long as he has. Bingley said many of his friends told him he should give up and just plead guilty.
Bingley believes his experience illustrates the problems when it comes to allegations of drugged impaired driving and the need for reliable tests to prove someone’s impairment.
“By no means do I think people should be out there driving drunk or under the influence. I have a son, I have a family. I don’t want to see someone get hurt,” he said. “If they have that law, they need to have the proper instrument to calculate that with. You have to have the right instrument.”
But Bingley’s lawyer, Trevor Brown, said he doesn’t believe the Crown’s decision to resolve Bingley’s case specifically with a traffic offence plea is an indictment of the drugged-driving testing regime.
“It probably says more about how you can successfully prosecute a case eight years later,” said Brown. “The careless driving resolution is an appropriate one, particularly considering the passage of time since this odyssey began.”
However, Brown said he remains very concerned about the reliability of a DRE’s evidence given the “weaknesses and frailties” that were exposed during Bingley’s two trials. Both resulted in not guilty verdicts.
In the first trial, the judge accepted the evidence of the DRE as a “lay” opinion, but found there was a reasonable doubt as to Bingley’s guilt and acquitted him. It was successfully appealed by the Crown.
At the second trial, the judge didn’t recognize the DRE as an expert witness following a special hearing known as a voir dire. This time the evidence was ruled inadmissible and Bingley was acquitted a second time.
Both a summary conviction appeal court and the Ontario Court of Appeal found that a DRE evidence was automatically admissible as expert evidence and didn’t require a voir dire.
Bingley challenged the Ontario Court of Appeal’s finding to the Supreme Court, which upheld the ruling that DREs don’t need to be vetted in a voir dire since their expertise had been established by Parliament and such challenges in every case would be a waste of judicial resources.
Sgt. John Kiss, who is manager of the Ottawa police impaired driving counter measures program and a member of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police working group on DREs, said he was “surprised” prosecutors agreed to the plea to a traffic offence in the long-running case.
Kiss said not all was lost, since the Supreme Court decision was still a win for policing.
“At the end of the day, we achieved a very positive ruling for the Supreme Court as far as road safety goes,” he said.
Kiss said Ottawa police currently have 16 DREs, but have been training recruits since 2012 on how to administer the standardized field sobriety testing. Currently 141 officers can conduct the roadside testing to determine if a driver should be taken for further evaluation by a DRE.
Kiss said police hoped the oral fluid screeners would be a “silver bullet” much like roadside alcohol breath tests. That won’t be the case, although Kiss said their eventual approval should simplify roadside testing.
It’s little comfort for Bingley though, who estimates the legal fight has cost him tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and lost wages. Eight years of court dates and being in constant legal limbo have been an emotional roller-coaster, he said.
About a week after his arrest for allegedly driving while drug-impaired, he was charged with dealing drugs. He later pleaded guilty to possession of marijuana for the purpose of trafficking and spent a year under house arrest followed by time on probation.
But Bingley said the experience has been a valuable life lesson, and one that he credits with turning his life around.
Since being charged in 2009, he’s moved up from his job as an apprentice labourer to a construction supervisor. Bingley’s also the proud father of a one-and-a-half year old, he said.
“It cost me a lot of money and a lot of stress,” Bingley said. “I’m happy it’s done. I’m happy with the outcome.”
aseymour@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/andrew_seymour
查看原文...
It was the end of a long legal saga for Carson Bingley that started with erratic driving on Merivale Road in May 2009 and led to a Supreme Court decision that streamlined drugged driving trials, just as the country moves toward legalizing marijuana by next July.
On Monday, the 36-year-old pleaded guilty to careless driving under the Highway Traffic Act and was given a $1,000 fine and one year driving prohibition. Court heard he swerved through traffic, drove in an opposite lane and then hit a parked car in a nearby parking lot.
Bingley was originally criminally charged with driving while drug-impaired after allegedly failing a roadside sobriety test administered by a specially-trained and certified police officer known as a “drug recognition expert” or DRE.
MORE: With marijuana legalization, a new problem sprouts: How to test for high drivers
He was taken to the police station, where he then underwent a 12-part evaluation for drug impairment that measures things like physical coordination, eye movement, blood pressure, pupil size and muscle tone. The evaluation, which is used across North America and Europe, was added to the Criminal Code in 2008 by the then-Conservative government.
The results of Bingley’s evaluation – coupled with his admission that he had used marijuana hours earlier and taken two Xanax – led the DRE to conclude he was impaired by marijuana.
But as Bingley’s experience has shown, proving cases of impairment by drugs can be difficult. Unlike alcohol, there are currently no approved roadside screening devices to determine precise levels of drugs in one’s system. Nor are there currently any legal limits on how much of a drug is too much to drive a car.
In April, the federal government proposed new offences as part of Bill C-46 that will make it a crime to drive with more than two nanograms of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, per millilitre of blood. The legislation will also authorize police to use oral fluid drug screeners at the roadside to determine whether drugs are present in the saliva if they reasonably suspect a driver has been using drugs. However, prosecutions will still rely on the evaluation by a DRE at a police station or the taking of a blood sample.
Outside of court on Monday, Bingley insists he wasn’t impaired by drugs, which motivated him to keep fighting the charges for as long as he has. Bingley said many of his friends told him he should give up and just plead guilty.
Bingley believes his experience illustrates the problems when it comes to allegations of drugged impaired driving and the need for reliable tests to prove someone’s impairment.
“By no means do I think people should be out there driving drunk or under the influence. I have a son, I have a family. I don’t want to see someone get hurt,” he said. “If they have that law, they need to have the proper instrument to calculate that with. You have to have the right instrument.”
But Bingley’s lawyer, Trevor Brown, said he doesn’t believe the Crown’s decision to resolve Bingley’s case specifically with a traffic offence plea is an indictment of the drugged-driving testing regime.
“It probably says more about how you can successfully prosecute a case eight years later,” said Brown. “The careless driving resolution is an appropriate one, particularly considering the passage of time since this odyssey began.”
However, Brown said he remains very concerned about the reliability of a DRE’s evidence given the “weaknesses and frailties” that were exposed during Bingley’s two trials. Both resulted in not guilty verdicts.
In the first trial, the judge accepted the evidence of the DRE as a “lay” opinion, but found there was a reasonable doubt as to Bingley’s guilt and acquitted him. It was successfully appealed by the Crown.
At the second trial, the judge didn’t recognize the DRE as an expert witness following a special hearing known as a voir dire. This time the evidence was ruled inadmissible and Bingley was acquitted a second time.
Both a summary conviction appeal court and the Ontario Court of Appeal found that a DRE evidence was automatically admissible as expert evidence and didn’t require a voir dire.
Bingley challenged the Ontario Court of Appeal’s finding to the Supreme Court, which upheld the ruling that DREs don’t need to be vetted in a voir dire since their expertise had been established by Parliament and such challenges in every case would be a waste of judicial resources.
Sgt. John Kiss, who is manager of the Ottawa police impaired driving counter measures program and a member of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police working group on DREs, said he was “surprised” prosecutors agreed to the plea to a traffic offence in the long-running case.
Kiss said not all was lost, since the Supreme Court decision was still a win for policing.
“At the end of the day, we achieved a very positive ruling for the Supreme Court as far as road safety goes,” he said.
Kiss said Ottawa police currently have 16 DREs, but have been training recruits since 2012 on how to administer the standardized field sobriety testing. Currently 141 officers can conduct the roadside testing to determine if a driver should be taken for further evaluation by a DRE.
Kiss said police hoped the oral fluid screeners would be a “silver bullet” much like roadside alcohol breath tests. That won’t be the case, although Kiss said their eventual approval should simplify roadside testing.
It’s little comfort for Bingley though, who estimates the legal fight has cost him tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and lost wages. Eight years of court dates and being in constant legal limbo have been an emotional roller-coaster, he said.
About a week after his arrest for allegedly driving while drug-impaired, he was charged with dealing drugs. He later pleaded guilty to possession of marijuana for the purpose of trafficking and spent a year under house arrest followed by time on probation.
But Bingley said the experience has been a valuable life lesson, and one that he credits with turning his life around.
Since being charged in 2009, he’s moved up from his job as an apprentice labourer to a construction supervisor. Bingley’s also the proud father of a one-and-a-half year old, he said.
“It cost me a lot of money and a lot of stress,” Bingley said. “I’m happy it’s done. I’m happy with the outcome.”
aseymour@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/andrew_seymour
查看原文...
