Source: Toronto Star (Canada) Contact: http://www.thestar.com/ Pubdate: Friday, October 9, 1998 Page: B1, B4 Author: Jim Rankin, Staff Reporter TECHNICALITY KILLS MISCONDUCT CHARGES Officers notified of police act hearing too late Serious allegations of police misconduct involving six Toronto drug squad officers - including questionable strip searches and searching homes without warrants - have been dismissed on a technicality. Superintendent Terry Kelly, a Toronto police officer who adjudicates hearings into charges under the Police Services Act, halted the case after the officers' lawyer, Harry Black, argued it had taken too long to bring the officers to the internal discipline tribunal. Black's argument was based on the provincial law governing police conduct. The Police Services Act says officers must be served with a notice of a hearing within six months of the complaint's facts first coming to the attention of the chief of police. Unlike criminal charges, police act charges must be laid and adjudicated within a set amount of time. The deadline in this case was missed by about two weeks. As a result of Kelly's decision to dismiss, delivered last week, evidence surrounding the allegations was not heard. The complaints stem from an October, 1997, arrest and detention of Toronto residents Memis Sipar and Arthur Christopoulou. Based on information from an unnamed informant that led police to believe Sipar was involved in cocaine trafficking, and after police surveillance, Sipar and Christopoulou were pulled over in separate vehicles on the afternoon of Oct. 28 and arrested. No drugs were found, yet both men were taken to central field command headquarters for questioning. The two men were strip-searched. Again, nothing was discovered. While police held the men and kept them from making phone calls, officers conducted searches of two addresses connected to Sipar - without obtaining proper warrants, a police complaints investigator would later find. Nothing turned up at those addresses either. Sipar was detained for six hours and was released without charges being laid. "The very essence of fundamental justice was denied" to the men, complaint investigator Detective William Nelson wrote in his summary of the probe into a complaint filed by Moishe Reiter a Toronto lawyer acting on behalf of Sipar. According to a witness statement in Nelson's investigative summary, this was the fourth time Sipar had been arrested, and not one of those arrests have ended in a conviction. In the three other arrests, charges were withdrawn. In his summary, dated April 27, Nelson found charges of discreditable conduct were warranted against Detective John Schertzer and Detective Constables Ned Maodus, Jonathon Reid, Gregory Forestall, Joseph Miched and Steve Correia. A complaint review officer agreed, and notices of a hearing were sent out to the officers and potential witnesses the next month. But that happened outside the six-month time limit. Evidence presented at the motion for dismissal showed the force was notified of the facts surrounding the complaint in a letter to the chief's office on Nov. 7, 1997. Notices of a hearing were not sent out until May 22 - - about two weeks after the six-month window had closed. Kelly said in his decision that the limitation rule "must be considered mandatory, not merely a directive" and is a procedural step designed to "protect the position of the officer(s) subject to the investigation in relation to any proceedings which may be brought" against them. Kelly pointed to an exception to the rule: The force can ask the police services board for more time on certain investigations. But that wasn't done in this case, he noted. Police prosecutor Staff Inspector Tom Dalziel said he could not comment. The complainant has 30 days to appeal to the Ontario Civilian Commission on Police Services. The police watchdog agency has the power to order a full hearing. - --- Checked-by: Mike Gogulski