Police mistakes prompt father's call for inquiry

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Ron Ignace wants some answers. His son is dead and the three men who killed him were convicted on a lesser charge as a result of police mistakes during the investigation.

Ignace, the former chief of the Skeetchestn Indian Band, has had a very heavy heart since his 21-year-old son Gabriel Palmer, known to his friends and family as Skooks, was viciously killed Dec. 30, 2002.

Ignace called this paper just an hour after Palmer's killers were sentenced to tell us of his call for an inquiry.

British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Richard Blair imposed sentence on three young Native men-Lance Jensen, 24, Raymond Peters, 25 and Travis Saul, 26-in Court 5D of the Kamloops courthouse on June 15. The judge was harshly critical of the police for their conduct of the investigation.

Family members say the three men convicted of killing Palmer were originally charged with second-degree murder after his body was found in the South Thompson River. His throat was slashed. He had been stabbed in the heart several times.

But confessions obtained by RCMP officers investigating the deaths were found to have been tainted. The three accused had not been properly informed of their rights.

"I'm in an abyss of grief, I'll tell you that," Ignace said. "The sentence was rendered this afternoon, about an hour ago, by the judge. We were saddened by the fact that the sentence was reduced from second degree murder down to manslaughter. I'll tell you, the way our son was murdered gives new definition to the word manslaughter. Even the judge noticed that in his judgement today. But because a deal was cooked between the Crown counsel and legal defense for the killers, the judge was bound by the precedents of law that deal with sentencing around manslaughter. So these guys got seven years, well 10 years, but three years off for time already spent."

It's not enough to satisfy the grieving father, who wanted the men to receive life sentences without parole.

"These guys are going to be 31 or 32 when they get out and our son will never live. Our community and our society was devastated by this," he said. "The judge really, for the first time, he said, in all his years of dealing with such crimes, really severely criticized the RCMP's handling-bungling-of this. We are calling for an independent inquiry because too many times this has happened."

Justice Blair didn't use the word bungle.

"That's my word," said Ignace. "What he said was very powerful and very dramatic. Never before in his whole career as a judge has he had to make these kinds of statements about a police investigation."

A published report in the Kamloops Daily News quoted the judge's remarks.

"The investigatory methods in this case struck me as different from the transparent and well-documented investigation I have observed employed by police when investigating serious crimes like murder," said Blair.

And he criticized the way the officers informed the accused men of their legal rights.

"In this investigation, the warning was casual, cursory and incomplete, and presented Crown with yet another unnecessary hurdle to the prosecution of the accused," he said. "It troubles me I have felt obliged to make these comments about the police investigation. I have in the past 12 years heard a number of very serious criminal trials. I cannot recall ever feeling it necessary to comment negatively on the investigation of the police in any of those cases."

Ignace said the entire justice system in British Columbia needs to be examined. He cited the recent conviction of a Prince George judge who terrorized and sexually exploited young Native women who appeared before him in court. He also mentioned the fact that police inaction allowed more young women, many of them Native, to disappear from the East Hastings area of Vancouver. Robert Pickton is charged with the murders of more than a dozen women who went missing from the downtown eastside.

Ignace believes he strong remarks from the bench will help him put pressure on the provincial government to call the inquest.

"The judge, in his strong condemnation of the police's behaviour in conducting this investigation, is more powerful than our . . . will only strengthen our call for an investigation. And I can't see them not listening to a judge."