A New Year & Deja Vu

A trial date has been set for the three B.C. Liberal political appointees charged in connection with the police raids on the B.C. legislature more than two years ago.
David Basi, his brother-in-law Robert Virk and his cousin Aneal Basi will go on trial on April 24. They have chosen to be tried by judge alone.

The above is almost today's news but instead it is from the CBC website for January 12, 2006. The rest of the article and pictures of Bobby Virk and Dave (or Udhe, as he is referred to in court documents) Basi can be found here

In fact there was a court hearing in the case yesterday and a date was set for trial. This time the trial is set to begin April 2, that is this year, 2007. We will see I guess. Supposedly this time all parties have agreed to not seek any further delays.

The defense is trying to have the warrants for the original raid (and the resulting evidence) and the wiretap evidence all thrown out. A date was set to look at these issues of March 5. This would be an egregious example of jurispudence by technicality and leave virtually no case and no chance for the people of British Columbia to ever know what was really happening as they were being fleeced of their assets, in this case BC Rail.

Also according to the ever vigilant BC Mary

Defence lawyers will also file another disclosure application on February 26, seeking more information from the Crown.

In a short 20-minute session marked by cooperation between defence lawyers and the special prosecutor, Justice Bennett set March 7 at 9 a.m. for an update on progress on disclosure of evidence in the RCMP Project Room, as granted in a previous hearing.

I fail to understand why the defence would delay for over a month to make application for further disclosure, or is it just part of a delay and procrastinate strategy? If they know they want more information from the crown and trial is coming the day after April Fool's day, why not ask for it now?

So to sort of sum up and re-iterate the current schedule is:

February 26 - Application for further disclosure

March 5 - Charter of Rights challenge of warrants and wiretaps

March 7 - Hearing to update progress on disclosure (project room)

April 2 - The trial scheduled to actually begin

Interestingly, the Public Access Completed Court Lists for January 11 through January 15 takes up 29 pages in .pdf format. Pages 14 through 28 deal exclusively with the Basi/Virk case and issues in that case. This from what was claimed to be a twenty minute, co-operative hearing. It remains to be seen if this proceeding will deliver justice, but there is no question it can certainly generate the paper. Perhaps this whole exercise is an attempt to stimulate the BC pulp industry. These results should be available until about the end of the week (or January 19-20) here.

Hopefully in spite of the attempts to demonize the RCMP as overzealous and the Attorney General making totally inappropriate and prejudicial statements, this trial will go ahead and justice will be served. Ideally as information is revealed it will lead to the true culprits in this criminal enterprise and I don't think that they are the Basis and Virk. Dave Basi and Bobby Virk didn't have the clout to shape policy or make decisions such as who to give a railroad to for peanuts. They were only the gatekeepers with the ability to manage access to the true players in this ongoing criminal enterprise otherwise referred to by me as the Soup Nazi and his cabinet full of Crackers.