The Crown has indicated it will consider appealing Tuesday’s verdict in the child pornography case of former Anglican priest Robin Barrett.
Barrett, 58, was acquitted of charges of distributing, accessing and possessing child pornography after a Newfoundland and Labrador Supreme Court judge ruled that the majority of evidence against him was inadmissible since police had breached his rights.
Crown prosecutor Shawn Patten told The Telegram he respects Justice Vikas Khaladkar’s decision to exclude the evidence, but noted it affected his case.
“Now that the trial is complete and charges have been dismissed against the accused, the Crown will turn its attention to whether there are grounds for appeal,” Patten said in an email.
Barrett was arrested in July 2015, when police — having received information from investigators in Toronto and obtained a warrant to search Barrett’s home — used a battering ram to enter his Anchorage Road, C.B.S. house. After having been read his rights, Barrett said he wanted to speak with a lawyer. However, before he had an opportunity to do that, investigator Const. Terry Follett asked him a question, thereby breaching his rights. As a result, evidence of child pornography seized during the search was excluded from trial and gutted the Crown’s case.
Barrett’s lawyer, Mark Gruchy, had argued the use of the battering ram was also a breach of his client’s rights, but Khaladkar disagreed, saying police had followed correct procedure.
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The judge did agree that Follett had breached Barrett’s rights again a few months after his arrest, when, by request of a senior Crown counsel at the time, he visited Barrett and asked him about a roommate without reading him his rights first.
Khaladkar said if Barrett’s rights had been violated only with the question from Follett at the time of his arrest, he may have excluded only the resulting statements from Barrett. Because the breaches spanned months, however, he excluded all evidence gathered at the time of each breach.
It wasn’t Barrett’s first time charged with child pornography offences. In 2010 he pleaded guilty to possessing and distributing child pornography after police found 31,460 images and 3,451 videos on his computer data, some depicting children as young as six months old. He was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in jail and named to the national sex offender registry for 20 years.
At his sentencing hearing, Barrett apologized to his family for the “shame and harm” he had caused them, to his friends for breaking their trust, to his church family for “putting a bad light on the gospel,” and to his colleagues for “casting the clergy in a bad light.” Barrett was subsequently removed from his position as rector of Goulds parish.
After court, Gruchy told members of the media that protecting an accused person’s rights is protecting society, as counterintuitive as it may seem to some.
“The right to counsel, as guaranteed under the constitution, is, I would argue, one of the most zealously guarded rights by the courts, and the reason for that it is virtually the only thing which stands between us and very severe systemic police abuse,” Gruchy said, giving China as an example of a country where the right is less protected and many convictions are based on coerced confessions. “When you say, ‘I want to talk to my lawyer,’ when you’re detained for a crime, that has to be facilitated very assiduously or else very serious things will happen in criminal prosecutions.”
Twitter: @tara_bradbury
