A sexual assault charge against a former Thompson resident was stayed Aug. 5 by a judge who ruled that police and the Crown hadn’t taken necessary steps to ensure the matter came to trial within a reasonable timeframe.
Frank Graham was charged in 2011 with sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl and attended court twice before moving to Alberta in August of that year. Thompson RCMP were informed of his whereabouts in 2012 and 2014 but failed either time to extend Graham’s warrant to have him brought back to Thompson on the charge.
In 2012, the complainant told the Crown she was not going to cooperate with the prosecution. Later that year, when contacted by Thompson RCMP, the Crown office didn’t respond for months about whether they would approve extending the warrant. When they did, miscommunication between police agencies in Manitoba and Alberta led to Graham never being arrested. A similar series of events happened in 2014. Finally, in 2019, after the Crown spoke to the complainant to ensure she would cooperate, Graham was arrested in Nova Scotia and transported back to Manitoba, but his lawyer brought a delay motion, which was ultimately granted by provincial court Judge Stacy Cawley, who rejected the argument that most of the delay was caused by the defendant.
A 2016 decision by Canada’s Supreme Court found that a delay of more than 18 months between a charge being laid against someone and their trial’s expected conclusion is an unreasonable delay in provincial courts.
“The Crown and police should have known they were required to make timely decisions and the failure to act would risk the prosecution,” wrote Cawley. “Graham’s right to be tried within a reasonable amount of time has been violated.’
Cawley also said that because of the severity of the offence with which Graham was charged, RCMP and the Crown should have acted more quickly to arrest him when they had the chance. Cawley pointed out that such a long delay between a charge being laid and the trial occurring prejudices both the defendant’s ability to answer an accusation but also the Crown’s ability to effectively prosecute.
Graham’s lawyer Rohit Gupta told the CBC that the failure of the RCMP and the Crown to arrest Graham expeditiously once they learned of his whereabouts violated not only his client’s rights but also those of the complainant, who is Indigenous and has been involved with the youth criminal justice system.
“Had this complainant been in a locality such as Winnipeg, would the police have taken it more seriously?” Gupta asked. “It’s a failure of the Northern Manitoba system in general.”
