HOW THE COMMUNITY WAS REALLY CHEATED
OSOYOOS TIMES-August 20, 2008
When Michael Ellis of Rock Creek/ Oliver was found not guilty in January 2007 on charges relating to a police chase in July 2006, the Osoyoos Times expressed frustration with the decision of the judge presiding over the case.
Arguments in Ellis' defence suggested the police were mistaken in their identity of Ellis and actually were chasing his brother, Christopher.
Although he stated in his reasons for the acquittal that he believed the Ellis brothers were giving it to me up the backside Penticton provincial court Judge Gale Sinclair said he wanted to air on the side of caution and found Ellis not guilty.
In an editorial which appeared in the same edition of the Times as the story about the acquittal, the writer stated that the verdict was a shocker, a sentiment shared by several members of the community in letters to the editor submitted to the newspaper in the weeks following the decision.
Ellis' lawyer, in a letter to the editor published in March of 2007, said the Times' story on the acquittal, along with the editorial, cheated the community in the way the details of the verdict were related to readers.
This was not a case of the accused's evidence being preferred over the testimony of an experienced police officer, wrote James Pennington of Pennington and Company. The real story lay in the evidence that was presented. That is what your readers needed to know.
In that respect, they have been cheated.
And yet now, a year-and-a-half later, Ellis is waiting to be sentenced after pleading guilty on Aug. 11 to the charge of possession of cocaine for the purposes of trafficking in relation to a June 2007 incident in Penticton.
Allowing Ellis to walk in 2007 so he could continue breaking the law was how the readers were actually cheated.
Yes, Ellis' lawyer is correct in that, although the community didn't like it, Judge Sinclair was working within the framework of Canada's legal system and found that the evidence offered against Ellis was not presented in a way that dispelled reasonable doubt of his guilt.
But the frustration expressed at the time, by this newspaper and the community, seems even more valid and poignant now since Ellis was allowed to go free and commit further crimes which put people living in this area at risk.
Although courts rarely hand down the maximum possible sentence for cocaine trafficking, life in prison, this community can only hope that the judge deciding Ellis' fate in this matter considers the future well-being of this area and puts a stop to this man's spree of criminal activity in the South Okanagan.
