Surrey Six killer fights Crown’s attempt to limit hearing scope

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A lawyer for Surrey Six killer Cody Haevischer said Monday that a B.C. Supreme Court judge must look at all the issues related to alleged misconduct in the murder case before deciding whether charges against his client should be stayed.

Simon Buck urged Justice Martha Devlin to reject a Crown application to get one of the issues raised by Haevicher’s lawyers dismissed before a full evidentiary hearing is held in the long-running case.

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The hearing reopening the case nine years after Haevischer and his co-accused Matthew Johnston were convicted comes after the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in April that police misconduct in the Surrey Six investigation warranted an evidentiary hearing in which witnesses could be called and cross-examined.

Lawyers for both men argued at the Supreme Court of Canada that misconduct by some officers on the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team was so egregious that there should have been a full evidentiary hearing on the issue at the original trial. The officers partied and had sex with potential witnesses in the case and three were later convicted of obstruction of justice.

And the lawyers said that both killers were held in deplorable pretrial conditions immediately after their arrests, which also should be factored into their application for a stay of proceedings.

Johnston died of cancer in December 2022.

On Monday, Crown prosecutor Mark Wolf argued that Devlin should summarily dismiss part of the Haevischer’s application related to a failure to disclose details of the post-trial custody of a key witness who can only be identified as Person Y.

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Person Y had been part of Haevischer’s Red Scorpion gang before he decided to co-operate with police and testify about the Oct. 19, 2007 murder of six men — including two bystanders — on the penthouse floor of Surrey’s Balmoral Tower highrise.

Buck said the Crown failed to disclose that Y went into witness protection just five days after he finished his testimony.

That means that Y lied when he claimed in his evidence that he would spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement because of his decision to turn on his former friends, Buck said.

Without any information about the witness protection deal in place, Buck said the defence couldn’t cross-examine Y on this part of his evidence.

But Wolf said the B.C. Court of Appeal had already heard this argument from Haevischer’s legal team and dismissed it in an earlier ruling.

“The Crown’s position is that Mr. Haevischer cannot make out these allegations of abuse because the Court of Appeal has already ruled against him on these issues. And those decisions bind this court. That’s the Crown’s position in a nutshell,” Wolf said.

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Buck said the arguments the defence is making now are different than those made before the appeal court.

And he said the prosecution is “doing everything it can to avoid going to a full hearing on the alleged Crown misconduct concerning the non-disclosure.”

He reminded Devlin that Haevischer’s team only learned about the witness protection details when former co-accused Jamie Bacon was before a different judge in 2017 reviewing whether his charges should be stayed.

“Mr. Haevischer and, in turn, the public need to know why the Crown was doing this — what was in their mind — because it’s the integrity of the justice system that is impacted.”

Devlin reserved her ruling on the Crown application until Dec. 1.

When the evidentiary hearing is held in the coming months, former investigators in the high-profile murder case are expected to be called as witnesses. The defence also wants to call Crown prosecutors that worked on the trial.

Both Haevischer and Johnston were convicted in late 2014 of six counts of first-degree murder as well as conspiracy in a 2007 plot to kill rival gangster Corey Lal which spiralled out of control and left six men dead.

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Two of them, Ed Schellenberg and Chris Mohan, were bystanders who got caught in the slaughter because they were both on the 15th floor of the Balmoral Tower when the killers arrived.

And three others, Lal’s brother Michael and associates Ryan Bartolomeo and Eddie Narong were inside suite 1505 when Haevischer, Johnston and a gangster who can only be identified as Person X arrived and shot each of them.

The Supreme Court of Canada ruling means Haevischer has another chance to get his charges stayed.

kbolan@postmedia.com

X.com/kbolan

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