The policeman’s lot, as Gilbert and Sullivan pointed out, is not a happy one. Politicians or pundits conducting a manhunt may get away with simply asserting whatever they think about their designated villain, but a policeman has to prove it. Alas, proving things isn’t easy even when they’re true, and can be the very dickens when they’re not.
The late John Greenwood, Q.C, who served as Ontario’s Assistant Deputy Attorney General in the late 1970s, had a signature line he used to deliver with a straight face. “Anybody can convict the guilty,” he’d say to visitors to his office, “the trick is to convict the innocent.” People laughed uneasily, sensing it may not be entirely a joke.
It wasn’t. Investigators and prosecutors can’t forge or plant evidence, of course – at least, not without the risk of joining the defendants in the dock. But putting a spin on evidence is a different matter. Nothing stops lawmen from placing any fact in the worst possible light for a suspect. An investigator is free to ascribe evil motives to the most innocuous acts and offer the mixture as the Crown’s theory in court – or better still, leak the poisonous brew to the media as a news story. Drawing conclusions the evidence doesn’t support, or supports only if interpreted maliciously, is fair game. And if “fair” isn’t the right word for the over-zealous investigator, “risk-free” certainly is.
To be fair to the investigator, he has a dilemma that just about obliges him to put the worst spin on everything. The evidence he needs may not be accessible to him without a court order, and judges aren’t supposed to endorse “fishing expeditions.” Letting Mounties rummage around people’s closets in the hope of coming up with some skeletons isn’t considered cricket. Judges need to be convinced, at least in theory, that the policeman has reasonable grounds for believing, and does in fact believe, that the closet in which he intends to rummage contains a skeleton.
In other words, a policeman has to prove his suspects guilty before he can gather the evidence he needs to prove them guilty. This is what an Information to Obtain Production Orders tries to achieve, by stretching fact with the Hamburger Helper of innuendo if necessary, and by mixing the apples of intent with the oranges of conduct.
What actually went down? On the RCMP’s theory: bribery, fraud on the government and breach of trust, committed by Senator Duffy and Nigel Wright, former chief of staff of the Prime Minister’s Office. It’s supposed to have happened when Senator Duffy, having been called to task for cheating, or at least unethically padding his housing and travel expense account, agreed to save the government the embarrassment of a scandal. He would acknowledge having made an error and pretend to pay back the treasury some $90,000, provided that he would be “made whole” by the government, which would publicly affirm an innocuous version of events, stop investigating him, and repay him his ostensible repayment. Nigel Wright not only took part in negotiating these conditions, but when other sources could not be found to cover Senator Duffy’s sham 90,000 “repayment,” he paid the money out of his own pocket.
Okay. Here’s another theory based on the same narrative. The regulations governing senatorial travel- and housing expenses were murky. They were so murky that an outside audit, the Deloitte Report, expressed no opinion on whether a person could legitimately interpret them as Senator Duffy (and some other senators) did. The senate committee dealing with the matter was itself divided, with an earlier draft of its report censuring Senator Duffy, but the final version refraining from criticism. (The RCMP liking the earlier draft more is evidence only of the Mounties’ preference, not the relative accuracy of the two versions.) Meanwhile, Senator Duffy, believing that, far from having committed a crime, he didn’t even act unethically, wasn’t going to bankrupt himself to save the government a scandal. As an innocent man, he was going to fight to the bitter end.
Nigel Wright, by all accounts one of the straightest shooters ever to set foot in Ottawa, while not thinking that Senator Duffy committed a crime, did believe, according to the RCMP’s own report, that the Senator “had crossed ethical boundaries” and should reimburse taxpayers to the tune of $90,000. Wright, privately well-to-do, covered his own expenses while on government business. He had probably a stricter view than anyone of what was ethically correct. He was interested in making the taxpayer, not Senator Duffy, “whole” when he wrote a personal cheque that is now regarded as a possible bribe by Corporal Horton.
On this theory, was Wright wrong? I’d say yes; guilty of moral hypertrophy or a surfeit of ethics. The Adventures of a Moral Overachiever in a town of moral underachievers neither precludes nor assures a happy ending.
Original Article
Source: fullcomment.nationalpost.com
Author: George Jonas
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