Hamilton Spectator
By Brian Caldwell
WATERLOO REGION A disgraced police
officer's bid to save his job suffered a setback Tuesday when a judge upheld
both his convictions and sentence for stealing drugs.
A lawyer for Andrew Robson argued
last month that Waterloo Regional Police improperly entrapped him in an
on-the-job sting to see if he would pocket marijuana.
But in a ruling released Tuesday,
Justice James Sloan found there was nothing wrong with either the investigation
or subsequent 60-day conditional sentence Robson received for taking the bait.
"This is essentially a breach
of trust crime committed by a serving police officer and, if anything, it is at
the lenient end of the scale," the judge wrote in a four-page decision.
Defence lawyer Richard Niman said he
will now likely take the case to the Ontario Court of Appeal, a move that would
delay a disciplinary hearing on professional charges even longer.
Robson, 31, an eight-year member of
the local police service, spent well over two years suspended with pay
following his arrest in the fall of 2010.
He was taken off the payroll after
he was technically sentenced to time in custody early last year, but is still a
suspended member of the service.
Police targeted Robson after getting
information from a colleague that he and other patrol officers at the Cambridge
detachment were smoking dope like "fiends."
An undercover officer posed as a
distraught mother who had caught her son with four ounces of marijuana.
When she gave it to Robson for
disposal while he was working, he only turned in half of it and kept the rest
for himself.
The stolen marijuana was still in an
evidence bag in his knapsack when police arrested him on the way home after his
shift.
Robson pleaded guilty in Ontario
Court in Kitchener, but tried to get the charges thrown out due to an abuse of
process. His arguments, similar to those at the recent appeal, were rejected by
Justice Jeanine LeRoy.
In addition to a year on probation
and 120 hours of community service work, LeRoy gave him 30 days of house arrest
and 30 days with a nightly curfew.
The defence had argued for a
conditional discharge, which would have meant Robson did not acquire a criminal
record. A conditional sentence does result in a record and, under law, is
considered jail time.
Officers given custody for crimes
are almost automatically fired when disciplined under the Police Services Act.
As a result, Robson appealed both
his convictions and sentence — which has already been served — before a judge
at the higher Superior Court level.
Sloan upheld LeRoy's decisions on both
aspects of the case, making the Ontario Court of Appeal the next stop in a
process that has already dragged on for more than three years.
Police "had every right to be
very concerned and suspicious that one of their own officers may be a chronic
user of marijuana," Sloan wrote, stressing they had a duty to then
investigate.
Robson testified at his trial that
the stress of several traumatic incidents at work led to drug and alcohol
addictions.
He said he once came close to
killing himself with his police gun in 2009 while sitting in his cruiser in a
parking lot.
