Catch, release, forget

>> Trio arrested months ago find their case
lost in a bizarre maze of officialdom

AWAITING A DAY IN COURT:
Lucy Anacleto and Thomas Corcoran

by SAMER ELATRASH

Three months after she received a $140 ticket for blocking pedestrian traffic, Lucy Anacleto was flabbergasted when the Mirror told her this week that she was being charged with assaulting a police officer.

Anacleto, a women’s studies major at Concordia, received a ticket and two of her friends were arrested and charged with assault one Saturday night in September. Anacleto says that, seeing an obviously distressed-looking couple being questioned by police on St-Laurent, the three stopped to observe. An officer asked Anacleto to walk on, and when she refused, he began writing her a ticket.

“The officer told me to go home,” says Anacleto. Her friends objected, and say they were arrested after they refused to show identification to the officers.

When the Mirror called Montreal police this week, police spokeswoman Lynne Labelle said Anacleto was also being charged with assault. “But how can they arrest me without telling me they were arresting me?” asks Anacleto.

“I don’t know,” says Labelle when asked why Anacleto was not informed of the charge. “[The police report says] that, following the operation, they realized she assaulted an officer.” She says Anacleto was supposed to receive notice of the charges. “I don’t know why she didn’t.”

When asked what Anacleto did to elicit an assault charge, Labelle only says that, according to the report, Anacleto “was in touching distance of an officer.”

Anacleto’s friends, Thomas Corcoran and a visiting Toronto lawyer who requested anonymity to avoid possible repercussions, also have many questions about their arrests. They say they asked the officers to explain why they were ticketing Anacleto, and the officers demanded identification from them.

“I told them I didn’t have to show them identification,” says the lawyer. (Labelle, however, says identification must be shown at an officer’s request.) The officers then called for back-up, and soon afterwards about six police cruisers arrived on the scene. The lawyer and Corcoran were handcuffed and driven to a police station, where they sat in the back of a police cruiser for several hours. Eventually they were released, and as they walked past a gauntlet of police officers who were milling about the parking lot guzzling energy drinks, “One of them said: ‘Give me a reason, asshole,’” says Corcoran.

A month later, Corcoran showed up to the station for a fingerprinting appointment, but was told that the machine was broken and asked to return “whenever,” he says. When he went to court for his hearing in November, a court clerk told him she had no record of his and the lawyer’s file.

“She said, ‘It’s bizarre, but you’re not here.’ She said I hadn’t been filed or processed,” says Corcoran. Neither he nor the lawyer have since heard from the police or the court. Labelle says that although they face a serious charge, they were promptly released following their arrest because neither of them had criminal records.

Anacleto, Corcoran and the lawyer say they were manhandled during the incident, and the lawyer filed a complaint with the police ethics commission. The commission responded that it would investigate whether a breach of ethics occurred during the arrests after the criminal proceedings ended.

“The commission wants to know the police’s version,” which would emerge at the hearings, says commission lawyer Louise Letarte.

However, no one seems to know when the trial will happen.