Court rules accused cannot access all police documents in Vancouver pimping case
Credit to Author: David Carrigg| Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2020 02:07:56 +0000
Notorious pimp Reza Moazami has lost his bid to access all materials related to an investigation into disgraced Vancouver police detective James Fisher — who played a key role in getting Moazami jailed.
On Monday, the Court of Appeal for B.C. released a ruling that Moazami was not entitled to see all the thousands of pages of investigation documents into Fisher, under the Crown’s first party disclosure obligations.
Moazami wanted the documents to help him appeal his two convictions, one for a string of prostitution-related offences and the other for obstruction of justice.
Arrested and jailed in 2011, Moazami was sentenced in 2015 to 23 years in prison for more than two dozen counts of pimping and sexual interference with victims ranging in age from 14 to 19. Moazami later received an additional three years for attempting in 2012 to bribe a witness, one of the young women he was accused of victimizing.
The investigation was the largest ever undertaken by the Vancouver Police Department’s Counter Exploitation Unit and was a huge victory for the Vancouver police and Fisher, its one-time star detective.
Fisher pleaded guilty in August 2018 and received a 20-month jail sentence for breach of trust offences against two child victims of pimps. Fisher admitted that he had kissed one of the girls and provided misleading information in relation to a stabbing in which one of the girls was a witness or suspect.
At the core of Moazami’s appeal are that his trials involved an abuse of process resulting from Fisher’s misconduct. He also wanted the court to appoint a special commissioner to his case, which was also rejected by the appeal court.
Moazami has already received 3,500 pages of heavily redacted disclosure from the Crown. He was seeking to have most of those redactions removed, as well as access to up to 25,000 pages of investigation documents related to Fisher’s misconduct.
“I am not persuaded that any foundation has been laid to require the disclosure, as part of a first party disclosure package, of a complete inventory of all materials relating to the Fisher investigation,” Justice David Harris ruled. “I am not persuaded that there is any reasonable basis on which to conclude that the Crown has fallen, or is falling, short of discharging its first party disclosure obligations in relation to this appeal.”
with files from Ian Mulgrew