In other news, justice is dead in BC…

Amazing.  Apparently this morning in courtroom 54 at the Vancouver Supreme Court, a deal was brokered between the defence for Basi, Virk and Basi and the Crown.  Guilty pleas for Basi and Virk, in exchange for no jailtime, they get house arrest.  Charges of money laundering have been dropped on the second Mr. Basi.  I’m sure their  every whim will be quickly satisfied by unnamed and unreported people, for their service to the real criminals, who never even had to answer the questions on everyone’s lips.  “I can’t comment, it’s before the courts.”

 

This corruption trial has been completely corrupt itself from the start, to it’s pathetic non-ending.  The people of BC have been denied justice in this case.  The RCMP purposely, in my view, failed from day one to fully investigate when they warned the elected officials of the raid, and then chose to not gather evidence from the offices of the two ministers involved.  Originally we were told that the corruption extended to the highest offices in the province and involved organised crime and drug money laundering, but the focus of the investigation suddenly narrowed to the three scapegoats men who stood trial.  In related news, the RCMP contract is up in 2 years.  They have been under harsh critism recently, bungling the Picton case, ignoring the Highway of tears.  I wrote about some of these issues  here.

 

The provincial government illegally destroyed hundreds of emails, just before they were requested by the Defence lawyers.  They appointed a friend of the government to be Special Prosecuter, William Bernardino.  They quickly got rid of the first Judge in the case, when she seemed interested in finding the truth.  Replaced her with a friendlier Judge, Justice Anne MacKenzie, who showed a clear bias to the Crown, admonishing the defendants for rolling thier eyes, whiile allowing the only two witnesses we heard to commit perjury by not remembering anything.  About anything.  We learned that a Judge can arbitrarily impose a publication ban, in a trial that is very much in the Public interest, when neither the Defence or the Crown asked for one.  And we learned that the corporate media in this province don’t care.  Despite numerous letters from British Columbians begging them to appeal the publication ban, not one of them did.    Eventually, we did get some coverage, but it was pathetic and questionable in some cases.

 

Thankfully and partially because of this corporate give-away corruption scandal, BC has a great blogosphere.  Kootkoot nails it at House of Infamy and Mr. Mathews and BC Mary will soon weigh in here.  Also, Grant has a question for Campbell here.  This is not over.  This is just beginning, nobody can hide behind the courts now.  My guess is that the Premiere is not currently in the province.  We won’t see his face until October 27, when he is supposed to address the province.  Grant thinks he will use the opportunity to resign retire in an effort to never have to comment to the public on this, his personal mission to give away all of our assets.  I tend to agree.