An intriguing article in today's Globe and Mail suggests that the Crown's hasty decision not to prosecute the four RCMP officers implicated in the death of Robert Dziekanski may be reversed.There has already been slow but certain progress in this direction. Now Janusz Kochanowski, a senior Polish ombudsman, is calling for criminal charges to be laid. “New facts call for a reassessment of the previous decision,” as he puts it, referring to the appalling performance of the Four Horsemen at the Braidwood Inquiry.
Of perhaps even more interest, there is a hint of further slippage in the Crown position on the matter: once it was "has ruled out criminal charges," but now that's being reported as "an initial decision."
In other not necessarily unrelated news, Helen Roberts, the government lawyer who revealed the existence of an incriminating RCMP email just as the Braidwood Inquiry was supposedly winding up, has resigned from the file. This is no surprise: reputations are fragile things. But the government side now appears to be in considerable disarray.
Meanwhile the RCMP is backing away from the four officers, and the damage the latter have done to themselves is considerable. Events are unfolding, I think, with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy.
