06) TRUTH EMERGES IN FRANK PAUL DEATH

(The following article is from the April 16-30, 2008 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St. Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

PV Vancouver Bureau

Almost ten years after Frank Paul was left to die of exposure in a Vancouver alley, the full truth about his death has finally begun to emerge. The reality tells much about the systemic racism which marks everyday life for Aboriginal people in British Columbia.

     Frank Paul, a Miq'maq man originally from New Brunswick, spent years homeless on the streets of east Vancouver. On a cold December night in 1998, he was kicked out of a detox centre, despite being visibly intoxicated. Instead, Sgt. Russell Sanderson ordered rookie constable David Instant to dump Paul at an intersection in the Kitsilano neighbourhood. Instant drove to a different location, where Paul's lifeless body was found several hours later.

     The cover-up began immediately. Frank Paul's relatives back home in New Brunswick were told that he had been killed in a hit-and-run accident. Coroners and police officials refused to launch investigations, apparently confident that nobody would care about yet another death of a homeless Aboriginal man.

     But one person refused to go along, and on April 2, he had his day at the Davies commission which is finally probing the case.

     Back in 1999, Dana Urban, a former B.C. Police Complaint Commission counsel and prosecutor, saw the damning jailhouse photos and video of the police treatment of Frank Paul on that fateful night. Deeply disturbed by the images, Urban told Paul's relatives that it was not a hit-and-run death, and began to press for a full inquiry.

     Now living in Sri Lanka, Urban flew to Vancouver to state that the Vancouver police story did not fit the facts and forensic evidence. Urban testified that in his expert opinion, Paul's death deserved charges of "criminal negligence causing death and failing to provide the necessities of life." He said the case met the "two-pronged" charge-approval standard of having a strong likelihood of conviction and also of being in the public interest to prosecute and punish those responsible for his death.

     Instead, Sanderson was suspended for two days in 2000 and Instant for one day. Neither has faced criminal charges.

     Urban recommended that independent pathologist Dr. Rex Ferris evaluate Paul's death, and arranged for police complaint commissioner Don Morrison to view the evidence. According to Urban, Morrison walked out "disrespectfully" on Ferris, and went into his office to play computer solitaire. When Urban challenged Morrison to call an inquiry, the response was simply, "What do you want me to do, wreck a young officer's career?"

     Urban said the state of Paul's clothing showed that he had been dragged into the alley and dumped. But neither Sanderson nor Instant were ever questioned by a homicide investigator, nor were other jail or detox witnesses even located or interviewed.

     "My view was that the forensics and actual evidence didn't add up to what the officers were saying, more so as it related to officer Instant," Urban testified.

     At a rally outside the inquiry, Paul's cousin Peggy Clement, a Miq'maq from Elsibogtog, N.B., said Urban was "the first person to tell us the truth, that Frank was not killed in a hit-and-run accident. I came all the way from New Brunswick to hear Dana Urban today because he has fought for a decade to get the truth out about how Frank died."

     Inquiry commissioner William Davies said his final report will be delayed by a B.C. Supreme Court hearing into the B.C. criminal justice branch's refusal to let two ex-Crown prosecutors, now judges, testify why they refused to lay criminal charges in connection with Paul's death.