R v T & T (2015)
Mr Rice has been retained by one of the defendants on this major cocaine production case. The police received information from an informant about suspicious activity in a residential condominium suite. The police surreptitiously installed a video surveillance camera in the hallway outside the suspected suite. The video surveillance footage was then used to obtain a number of warrants authorizing the police to conduct covert entries into the suite and a video surveillance warrant to install other video cameras inside the suite. On an evidence exclusion motion, the trial judge ruled that a warrant was not required for the installation of the hallway camera because the tenant of the suite did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the common hallway under s 8 of the Charter of Rights. In another case, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice came to a contrary conclusion. Concurrent trials on two Indictments in this case are scheduled in 2015.
R v A & K (2012)
In this wiretap case the defendants were charged with conspiracy, drug trafficking and a criminal organization offence. At the conclusion of the investigation the RCMP obtained arrest warrants and the defendants were arrested at their residences. The police did not have search warrants for the defendants’ homes nor prior judicial authorization to enter the homes to carry out the arrests. Such a warrant is called a “Feeney warrant”. The police entered the residence of Mr Rice’s client during the arrest and seized evidence from the house. Mr Rice brought a pretrial motion to exclude the evidence from the trial because the police were not authorized to enter his client’s house in breach of his reasonable expectation of privacy under ss 8 and 24(2) of the Charter of Rights. The trial judge granted the motion and the evidence was excluded from the trial.
R v C A & K (2011)
This complex drug conspiracy and criminal organization investigation spread from Vancouver through Calgary to Edmonton and Fort McMurray. It resulted in multiple parallel prosecutions in Calgary and Edmonton. The general investigation and wiretap component generated over half a million pages of documents and related data which made this the largest volume of disclosure in Alberta legal history up to that time. Mr Rice brought a pretrial motion to exclude from evidence various wiretap intercepts because the RCMP breached the terms of the wiretap authorizations when they failed to properly monitor the telephone calls. The wiretap authorizations required the police to monitor and listen to the telephone calls live. It was argued that the police violated the court orders when they used a feature on the interception equipment called “put away” which meant they were not properly monitoring the intercepted calls in real time. The trial judge granted the motion and ruled that the search and seizure was an abuse of process under s 7 of the Charter of Rights.
R v C (2003)
This Edmonton case was the largest prosecution in Alberta legal history up to that time. It began on September 24, 1999, and was continuously before the courts until the trial judge granted the defendants’ motion for a stay of proceedings on September 8, 2003. A special courtroom was constructed in the Law Courts Building to accommodate the trial. The case involved two parallel trials, over 400 police officers, multiple wiretap authorizations and search warrants, and approximately 189,000 pages of documents. The third Information in the Provincial Court of Alberta had charged 37 defendants with 41 offences. The case became notorious when it began to collapse during two years of pretrial disclosure and privilege motions. The trial judge called it a “new species” when she stayed all charges for breach of the defendants’ right to be trial within a reasonable time under ss 11(b) and 24(1) of the Charter of Rights.