A Victoria man convicted of drug dealing was not entrapped by police, according to a recent B.C. Supreme Court ruling.
Nicholas Benjamin Michael Perri sought to have court proceedings against him stayed, arguing that the initial call he received from an officer seeking to purchase drugs constituted entrapment.
In a decision issued last month but posted online Thursday, B.C. Supreme Court Associate Chief Justice Heather J. Holmes rejected Perri's application.
Holmes, who found Perri guilty of possessing cocaine for the purpose of trafficking during his initial trial, determined that Victoria Police Department Const. Jennifer Gilroy's initial words to Perri did not meet the legal test for entrapment.
According to Holmes, Gilroy had encountered Perri in person less than a week before she called him to pose as a drug buyer.
The officer encountered Perri in the parking lot of the Travelodge at 123 Gorge Rd. She asked him if he lived there and he said he didn't. He also declined to say who he was visiting, according to the court decision.
This, coupled with the fact that Perri drove a BMW and was "dressed fairly well" in the "high crime area," led Gilroy to suspect he might be trafficking drugs, according to Holmes.
Gilroy then looked up Perri in a police database and learned that he was being investigated by West Shore RCMP for suspected drug trafficking. The court decision indicates this information was reinforced by a Const. Ewington, who had recently left VicPD for West Shore RCMP. He told Gilroy that he believed Perri was a drug dealer and gave her the phone number she eventually used to reach Perri.
None of this information constituted "reasonable" grounds for suspecting Perri of drug trafficking, Holmes wrote in her decision, saying instead that the information had to be treated as a "bare tip."
"On the evidence, the various sources of information known by the police may have properly caused Const. Gilroy to suspect that Mr. Perri was trafficking drugs at 123 Gorge and elsewhere," the associate chief justice wrote.
"However, and as the Crown agrees, they did not, singly or in combination, meet the standard of providing a reasonable basis for such a suspicion. As a result, when Cst. Gilroy made the first call to Mr. Perri, she did so without a reasonable suspicion that he (or the number she was calling) were engaged in drug trafficking."
Because of this, Gilroy's opening remark to Perri was the key to the question of whether she entrapped him. If Holmes had determined that Gilroy gave Perri the opportunity to commit a crime, her lack of reasonable suspicion would have constituted entrapment, according to the decision.
Gilroy began her call to Perri by saying, "Hey, can you help me out, I’m looking for 80." Holmes noted in her decision that the "80" in question was not a reference to a specific type of drug, but rather to an amount – $80 worth – of an unspecified drug.
Perri responded by asking if she was looking for powder, to which Gilroy said "no, hard," meaning crack cocaine.
"The evidence does not establish that Const. Gilroy’s opening remark … offered an opportunity to Mr. Perri to commit an offence," Holmes wrote. "Mr. Perri was not entrapped by that remark. Mr. Perri agrees that by the time, later in the conversation, when Cst. Gilroy’s remarks were specific enough to offer an opportunity to commit an offence, she had a reasonable suspicion that he was drug trafficking."
Holmes therefore dismissed Perri's application for a stay of proceedings.
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