Catcheway case exposes flaws in justice system

Opinion

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This article was published 25/05/2018 (2407 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you listen to the subject matter experts who weighed in, Richard Joseph Catcheway fell prey to a failure to communicate.

The 32-year-old habitual criminal offender was arrested in September 2017 and charged with breaking into a Fort Richmond home to steal electronics. He eventually pleaded guilty and spent more than six months in jail.

Nobody involved in the case — not the prosecutor, defence lawyer, probation officer or the judge — thought much about the final disposition. A victim of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and a product of the Manitoba foster care system, Catcheway was a drug and alcohol addict who had been in and out of the justice system since his teens.

His guilty plea in this case was just another in the hundreds of guilty pleas that are processed in Manitoba courts each week, many of them involving men and women like Catcheway.

However, in the system’s haste to fit Catcheway into a familiar narrative, everyone overlooked one nagging, little fact: Catcheway was already in custody in the Brandon Correctional Centre at the time of the Fort Richmond break-in.

In early May, the Manitoba Court of Appeal quashed his conviction and directed an acquittal. The time he served will be used against a possible sentence he will receive for other, unrelated offences.

The aggravating factors in this case make it hard to deduce exactly who is at fault for this miscarriage of justice. That having been said, Catcheway’s wrongful conviction is a product of a system in which just about everyone involved in the administration of justice has been encouraged to find the quickest, easiest and least complicated solution to the most mundane of cases.

Catcheway was represented by Scott Wilson, a private bar lawyer under a certificate from Legal Aid Manitoba. He has so far resisted requests from the Free Press for comment. However, in the materials put before the appeal court, we can see Catcheway did not do much to help his own cause. Given his drug and alcohol problems — and he admitted to using methamphetamine daily up until his arrest on the Winnipeg charges — he couldn’t remember whether he broke into the home in question.

As for the guilty plea, Catcheway indicated he did not want to endure the stress of a trial. It’s also not clear whether he was even able to read and comprehend the charges that were laid against him.

Given his lengthy criminal history, his problems with addiction and the almost mundane nature of the charges against him, it’s hardly surprising he was fitted for this crime. Except this was a mistake that really should not have happened under any circumstances if — and this is a big “if” — all of the players in the justice system had done their jobs.

At multiple stages of this case — Catcheway’s arrest, the decision to remand him in custody, the review of the charges by the Crown attorney, the review of the case by his defence lawyer, the pre-sentencing review by his probation officer and the final review by the judge — the information that would have shown he could not have done this thing was readily available: his criminal record.

In fact, it is almost inconceivable that his “sheet,” as it’s called in the system, would not have been provided to all of the parties noted above. It’s basic, foundational documentation that is part of every criminal proceeding. From the moment he was arrested, police could have checked his record. When the case was assigned to the Crown, another opportunity to check that basic source of information was presented.

Certainly, Catcheway’s criminal record had to be included in information provided to the defence lawyer. At some point, the judge and the probation officer who prepared the pre-sentence report would have had access to the same information. And given that he was cognitively challenged and admittedly impaired, it seems even more obvious that someone at some point in the proceedings should have checked his record.

In legalese, there is a term that is used to describe situations where someone deliberately steers clear of factual information in order to limit their future liability in a criminal or civil matter: wilful blindness. Although not widely applied in these situations, it’s hard not to see this as a case of wilful blindness, where those responsible for the administration of justice ignored basic information that undermined the very foundation of the case against Catcheway.

And now that it has been exposed as a miscarriage of justice, all those involved can claim they had no idea he was in custody at the time of the break-in. That could only have been possible if the stewards of the case collectively decided to avoid scrutinizing his sheet. And make no mistake about it, the wilful blindness in Catcheway’s case is present in most of Canada’s most famous cases of wrongful conviction.

In those cases, it was less a matter of checking a simple legal record and more a situation where someone at some point in the prosecution of people such as David Milgaard, James Driskell and Kyle Unger — to name just a few of the more notable Manitoba cases — realized there was a fatal flaw in the case against them. However, rather than pursue those flaws to see if they truly undermined the case, police and prosecutors turned a deliberate blind eye.

The fact nobody looked at Catcheway’s sheet until after he was sentenced for a crime he could not have committed speaks volumes about the current state of the justice system.

In short, our system is short-staffed, underfunded and overworked. There are too many cases and too few courtrooms to properly deal with them. Accused persons who feature Catcheway’s array of challenges — poverty, substance abuse and cognitive issues — quickly find themselves trapped on the justice assembly line, where cases are moved in and out with harsh efficiency.

The structure of Legal Aid also works into this equation. Private bar lawyers are only paid about $400 for a guilty plea, which pays for up to three hours of their time. If it takes longer, the lawyer cannot be paid more unless they apply for additional funding — and for a case like this, it would be unlikely that the system would pay for more than three hours’ work.

This funding structure not only compromises the thoroughness of the justice system, it has encouraged some lawyers to set up practices or firms that do nothing else but process guilty pleas.

Often referred to as “dump truck” operations, these lawyers or firms only do simple Legal Aid cases that more often than not result in plea bargains, making up for low fees with high volume. It’s a system that most lawyers agree adds considerably to the odds that innocent people will be railroaded into guilty pleas as the simplest and easiest way of disposing with a case.

The term “dump truck” is instructive in Catcheway’s case. When it’s time to haul away unwanted items, we look for the quickest and easiest route to the dump. In this case, that route did not allow for a few minutes to scrutinize the most basic of court records.

Catcheway is unlikely to receive any compensation for this miscarriage of justice. His name will not be mentioned in the same breath as Milgaard, Driskell, Unger, Guy Paul Morin or Steven Truscott. However, it would be helpful, for the justice system in particular and society in general, if police and lawyers involved in the administration of justice could remember his name.

Take your time. Don’t cut simple corners. And whatever you do, don’t get caught in a Catcheway.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca