ALERTA - ALERT! Latin American Community, which "mouthpieces of the Community Radio" are helping to cover-up the impunity of heinous crimes perpetrated by the Metropolitan Toronto Police?

Ecuadorian Countrymen: "Assemblyman Alianza Pais" Supporting Police Violence in Canada!!! 

Jake Edmiston | July 20, 2016 8:18 PM ET
More from Jake Edmiston

Toronto police officer accused of planting heroin faces obstruction, perjury charges in another case

A Toronto police officer, already accused of planting heroin in a 2014 drug investigation, is facing fresh charges after police scrutinized his past cases.

Const. Benjamin Elliot, 33, with nine years experience, will be in court Thursday on charges of perjury and two counts of obstruction of justice, police said. The charges are on top of seven perjury and obstruction of justice charges laid against Elliot in January for allegedly sprinkling heroin in a suspect’s car to justify a search.

In 2014, Const. Elliot and three other officers arrested Nguyen Son Tran after they found plastic-wrapped heroin tucked behind the steering column of his car during a traffic stop. But Ontario Superior Court Judge Edward Morgan threw out the case, concluding that the police had no right to search Tran’s vehicle. The officers said they searched the car after noticing white powder on the centre console. Judge Morgan, however, found the officers concocted a reason to search the vehicle by planting the heroin on the console after the fact.

Related

• Four veteran Toronto police officers arrested and charged with perjury and obstruction of justice
• Toronto police planted loose heroin in suspect’s car to justify illegal search, judge rules

“This police misconduct,” Judge Morgan wrote in his decision last summer, “outweighs the roughly 12 grams of heroin found by the police. That quantity of drugs is, of course, a serious matter; but the misconduct evidenced here is entirely beyond anything that the courts can accept.”

In the wake of the ruling, the four officers were charged and Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders announced in January that he had assembled a team of Professional Standards investigators to comb through the officers’ past cases for “any other causes of concern.” That probe led to the latest charges against Const. Elliot, police said Wednesday.

The new charges stem from Elliot’s investigation into Tran a year before the alleged evidence planting. In 2013, Elliot stopped Tran in an underground parking lot and found heroin in the vehicle. Tran’s lawyer argued that the evidence was inadmissible because the search was illegal. In this case, however, the judge denied the Charter challenge and Tran changed his plea to guilty. He was convicted of drug possession for the purpose of trafficking and sentenced to 30 months in jail. He served 18 months and was released in September 2015.

Tran applied to appeal that conviction last month, in light of the first set of charges against Const. Elliot. In the appeal application, Tran’s lawyer writes that Elliot told court he noticed a black wire in Tran’s glove compartment when Tran reached for his ownership and insurance documents. Elliot searched the car, suspecting the wire led to a secret compartment behind the glove box where Tran was hiding drugs. The wire did, in fact, lead to a package of heroin, according to the appeal application. But Tran says he never opened the glove box to get his ownership.

“His position was that P.C. Elliot lacked reasonable and probable grounds to arrest,” the appeal application reads, “and fabricated his grounds for doing so in order to justify the unlawful search and seizure of the heroin.”

Mike McCormack, the president of the Toronto Police Union, was unavailable for comment Wednesday. In an earlier statement, after the initial charges against Elliot and his colleagues in January, McCormack stressed that none of the allegations had been proved in court.
National Post, with files from Cameron Axford and Douglas Quan, National Post

I went to law school. And I became a prosecutor. I took on a specialty that very few choose to pursue. I prosecuted child abuse and child homicide cases. Cases that was truly gut-wrenching. But standing up for those kids, being their voice for justice was the honor of a lifetime.                            - Susana Martinez