LILLEY: Judge's crazy gun ruling brings court into disrepute

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A Trudeau-appointed judge in Brampton has thrown out serious gun charges, claiming the accused was only stopped and searched due to racism.

Justice Renu Mandhane, the former head of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, has put the future of many prosecutions in jeopardy with this flimsy judgment that must be appealed and overturned.

Mandhane has sullied the reputation of the Peel Police Service, the officer in charge and let a man arrested with a loaded rifle in his car walk free without trial.

In October 2023, Officer Anand Gandhi, a man originally from India who moved to Canada and became a police officer, was on patrol in Brampton. While driving past a red Jeep, Gandhi’s automatic plate reader alerted him that the owner of that vehicle had a suspended driver’s licence and the vehicle was “impound eligible.”

He was also alerted that the man was facing drug charges in Toronto.

At this point, Officer Gandhi called for back-up and then proceeded to approach the vehicle where the driver confirmed his identity. At this point, Gandhi cuffed the man and put him in the back of the cruiser while an inventory of the vehicle was taken.

Adrian Wolley, president of the Peel Police Association, said that it’s standard for officers to place suspects in the back of a cruiser and to conduct an inventory before a vehicle is impounded to ensure that no one can claim something was stolen.

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“To search the car is always done now,” Wolley said. “We’re not going to pop the engine and look through the glove box or anything like that, but we’re going to go and lift mats or lift through bags and stuff like that because they could say, ‘I had $5,000 cash, and the officer must have stolen it.’”

Wooley said the search was legal and by the books, but Mandhane declared it an illegal search contrary to the Charter. She also found that the decision to put cuffs on the accused and put him in the back of the car was a Charter violation.

To arrive at all of this, Mandhane relied on the notion that everything Gandhi did was because of racial bias and not good policing.

“On a balance of probabilities, I find that Officer Gandhi relied on information about the accused’s outstanding charges (of which he was presumed innocent) combined with stereotypes about Black men being more prone to criminality and more dangerous than other people, to justify his decision to arrest and detain the accused,” Mandhane wrote.

“While Officer Gandhi’s racial bias was likely unconscious and the product of our culture and his own worldview, that is not an excuse or even a mitigating factor in terms of the seriousness of the conduct,” she wrote. “The fact that Officer Gandhi is himself is racialized — he is a Brown man — does not insulate him from the insidious power of anti-Black racism, stereotype, and racial bias.”

With this finding, Mandhane excluded the loaded gun, and anything the accused said, from being used at trial which means the man was let go. These are exactly the kinds of guns that the Liberals in Ottawa say they want to take off the streets; in fact, this model was banned five years ago, put on a prohibited list, but Liberal-appointed judges come up with rulings like this.

Meanwhile, legal, licensed gun owners who used to take guns like this to the range are prohibited from using them.

They would face serious jail time for taking them to the range. If you possess an illegal Beretta CX4 and carry it around loaded in the back of your vehicle, you can be set free without even a trial, depending on your race — and if you can get before Mandhane.

“While firearms offences are serious, admitting the firearm into evidence in the context of this case would bring the administration of justice into disrepute,” she wrote.

No, Justice Mandhane, you and your decision bring the administration of justice into disrepute. Let’s hope this outrageous decision is overturned.

blilley@postmedia.com