Underfunding of B.C.'s court system is being blamed once again for stayed charges against a suspected criminal -- this time, a man accused of luring a young teen over the internet.
David Alan Blattler was arrested in October 2009 after allegedly arranging to meet with a girl he had been chatting with over the internet. The "girl" was actually New Westminster Det. Mike MacFarlane, a skilled investigator who specializes in catching internet child predators.
But by Jan. 25, the single computer luring charge had yet to go to trial, a 27-month delay that led provincial court Judge Daniel Steinberg to grant a stay of proceedings.
While Steinberg acknowledged that luring is an "extremely serious" charge and protecting children should be a priority for the justice system, he said he had no choice but to toss the case out. The blame for that, the judge said, lies squarely with the provincial government.
"I find that the consequences of the government's decision-making and priority-setting have meant the creation in this case as in many others of an intolerable delay…. It offends society's right to have these serious matters aired publicly. It offends the very real need … to suppress predatory behaviour on the internet," Steinberg wrote.
"The government has spoken through its actions and the stay which I now enter as the remedy ... is the consequence."
The judge's words attracted the attention of the BC NDP, and party leader Adrian Dix read out sections of the ruling in the legislature Wednesday.
"When is the government going to take action to address the crisis -- the real crisis -- in our court system?" he asked.
Since Steinberg issued his decision last month, the government has appointed nine new provincial court judges in an effort to lift some of the burden on courts across B.C.
Still, the new additions might not be enough. As of November, the provincial court system was facing a shortfall of about 16 full-time judges. Steinberg says that in the short time since then, three provincial court judges have retired and seven have shifted to part-time work.
"The government, despite having up to a year's notice about retirements, has allowed those retirements to happen without any replacements and the complement of judges therefore has been eroded by a further six-and-a-half equivalent full-time judges," the judge said.
Provincial court judges tossed out 109 cases last year because the accused waited too long to get to trial, doubling the number of cases stayed in 2010. An estimated 2,500 cases are currently in danger of being tossed -- about 18 per cent of all cases in the system.
"There is in my opinion, only one word to describe the current state of the provincial court of British Columbia's ability to handle its caseload: abysmal," Steinberg wrote.
"There is no amount of press releases or talk show appearances that is going to fix the over-stretched limits of our institutional resources. There is only one course of action that will fix the current situation and that is action, not words."
In Blattler's case, Steinberg says that the accused and his defence team deserve none of the blame for the delay. The judge said that everything Blattler did suggested he wanted to be done with the process quickly, and he even told his lawyer to rush to the trial stage, "as I wanted the uncertainty of my future to end."
The bulk of the delay, according to the judge, was due to the 14 months it took for the Abbotsford Police Department to complete a forensic analysis of Blattler's computer. A draft report on that process -- including the news that new evidence had been discovered -- was given to Crown prosecutors just six days before the trial was set to begin, leading to an adjournment.
"That delay can only be laid at the foot of the Crown in the form of the police," Steinberg wrote.
However, he acknowledged that Abbotsford officers were very busy investigating multiple murders at the time.
"It may very well be that the police are as severely under-funded as the courts are. It would not surprise me in this province."
Just last week, Premier Christy Clark announced that she had appointed Vancouver lawyer Geoffrey Cowper to perform a sweeping review of the B.C. justice system in an attempt to address court delays and backlog that have allowed dozens of accused criminals to avoid trial.
Judges responsible for staying charges ranging from cocaine trafficking to drunk driving and assaulting a police officer have blamed a lack of funds and resources, an opinion echoed by the NDP and lawyers' associations, but Clark says she is reluctant to inject more money into the courts.
"We have been adding resources to the system. It hasn't been solving the problem, so we have to look a lot more deeply at what the systemic problems are," she told reporters Wednesday.
Each new provincial court judge costs $1.4 million, according to the government.
