by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

The deflated seat cushions in lawyer Reevin Pearl’s waiting room chairs have welcomed more than a few backsides that have also done time on prison benches. From his years of local lawyerly observation, Pearl has learned that it’s not uncommon for an entirely innocent person to be apprehended, shackled and imprisoned without any good reason.

Pearl sympathizes with the plight of the innocently apprehended but also seeks to inform them of their rights. “Nobody ever wants to lose their freedom for a prolonged period of time,” he says. “It goes right to the issue of what our free and democratic country is about. The rule of law has to be respected both by private citizens and by the arms of the governing authority.”

While perhaps no amount of money can extinguish the infinite anguish and scars of being falsely imprisoned, Pearl notes that civil court judges can offer a cash balm to the wrongly jailed. “If you have a valid case in civil law, they’re giving $3,000 to $5,000 per day spent in jail,” he says.

Hearsay not enough

One case that Pearl has now before a Quebec civil court involves the saga of Abby-Lee Tibbo. The LaSalle-bred Tibbo married a man 24 years her senior back in 1985. Six years into the relationship, she noticed he had a habit of being abusive. After four episodes of mayhem landed her hubby with 11 convictions on a cornucopia of domestic abuse charges, Tibbo received full custody of her three children. She escaped the festival of anarchy and acrimony to what she thought would be peaceful days in British Columbia, only to be arrested and imprisoned for kidnapping her children. She was brought across the country and jailed on Thanksgiving Day, 1998. Pearl says the shocking arrest was simply the result of poor investigative work by Montreal police. Pearl and Tibbo are suing them for $1.3-million.

Pearl offers some guidelines for those forced to hear the sad music of jail doors slamming them in, away from their lives.

“Some people think police have the absolute right of arrest,” he says. “They have a right to conduct an arrest if they see a crime being perpetrated and act on their own to arrest and apprehend the person doing the crime. But if they don’t see the crime and have a complaint from a private citizen saying, ‘I’ve experienced theft or robbery’ or whatever, then they have the duty to investigate, and that investigation entails a very deep analysis of all information and all sources to see if the case is credible and valid and reasonable.”

If you get arrested, you have the right to face a judge within 24 hours. If you are then tried and acquitted, then you might consider an autopsy of your ordeal. “You have to look at the facts giving rise to the acquittal—is it because they had no proof?” asks Pearl.

Domestic disarray

Another high-profile Pearl client is Rosemont’s Alain Olivier, who spent eight years of a 40-year sentence in Thailand as a result of a botched RCMP drug sting. Pearl is seeking $27.5-million. “He was entrapped by the RCMP and brought over to Thailand to do a buy and was then busted,” Pearl says. “That’s a hell of a serious case from a human rights point of view.”

But Pearl says most cases of unreasonable imprisonment arise from questionable policing policy concerning domestic disputes. “What’s really disturbing to me is that the police have told me that they have a directive from the attorney-general’s office of Quebec to the effect that the moment a complaint comes in from a woman about a connubial dispute, they shouldn’t question it. They arrest the man and put him in jail and then let the judge decide whether the case could go forward or not,” he says. “What’s disturbing to me as a lawyer is that any time a gal wants to really cause a hassle to her boyfriend or husband, the police will jump on it and make an arrest and physically apprehend you and put you in jail for the night.

“It’s a situation that’s quite sensitive, but I can say that there should be a bit more confidence in the police to assess on the spot whether a man should be brought in or not.”