Month: May 2025
OPP in Leamington, Ont., racially profiled Black man facing drug offences, judge rules in acquitting him
A man arrested for drug offences was racially profiled by Ontario Provincial Police in Leamington, a Superior Court judge has ruled, deeming the evidence against him inadmissible as a result.
Justice Martha A. Cook acquitted the man on one of the charges after Crown prosecutors withdrew the second.
“This is not a close case,” Cook wrote in the decision released in December.
“The case law is consistent and clear … Anti-Black bias, whether implicit or otherwise, must be denounced as anathema to the rule of law and the integrity of our justice system.”
The case dates back to December 2020, when OPP officers Melodie Gratton and Mitchell Smithson tailed a black BMW for several minutes and followed it into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven, according to court documents.
CBC is not naming the driver because there are no outstanding charges against him.
Mental health advocates slam Windsor mayor’s support of involuntary treatment
Advocates and legal experts who deal with the mentally ill are expressing strong opposition to a suggestion by Windsor’s mayor that involuntary treatment is a way to address a burgeoning mental health and addiction crisis in Canadian cities.
“How do we have leadership that is engaging in an almost draconian mentality?” said Windsor criminal defence lawyer Patricia Brown, who specializes in mental health law.
“This was the law in the ’70s and the ’60s where people were apprehended and locked away in institutions, and it wasn’t working,” she told the Star. “The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is there because we deal with the fundamental freedoms of all members of society.
“Everyone has rights. These are still people.”
Overcrowding, lockdowns inside this Windsor-area jail are so persistent, it’s leading to reduced sentences
Overcrowding and frequent lockdowns due to short staffing: These are some of the conditions at the South West Detention Centre that led to a lighter sentence of a Windsor man charged with gun trafficking.
In March, Lawrence Davis was sentenced to seven years in jail after he was found guilty on gun-related charges. Davis was charged in December 2021 after he got into an argument with a man in a vehicle at a parking lot near Tecumseh Road East and Forest Glade Drive.
The heated argument turned into a gunfight — one man died, while Davis was shot in the shoulder and treated in hospital.
Without being able to prove whether Davis acted out of self-defence, first degree murder and attempted murder charges were dismissed.
But in the publicly available decision related to Davis’s probation breaches and gun-related charges, the judge says he considered the conditions the man faced during his pre-sentence custody at the South West Detention Centre (SWDC).
Those conditions included multiple lockdowns and sleeping three people to a two-person cell…