Stay of Final 20 Murder Charges
Pickton had faced a further 20 first degree murder charges involving other female victims from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. On February 26, 2008, a family member of one of the 20 women named as alleged victims told the media that the Crown had told her a trial on the further 20 counts might not proceed.
On August 4, 2010, Crown prosecutors stayed the balance of the pending murder charges against Pickton, ending the prospect of any further trials.
The 20 charges were formally stayed by crown counsel Melissa Gillespie shortly after 4 p.m. during a British Columbia Supreme Court hearing at New Westminster.
Most (but not all) of the publication bans in the case were lifted by the trial judge, James Williams of the British Columbia Supreme Court, after lawyers spent hours in court going through the various complicated bans.
On August 6, 2010, various media outlets released a transcript of conversations between an RCMP undercover operator and Pickton in his holding cell. While the RCMP censored the undercover officer's name throughout most of the document, his name was left uncensored in several portions of the document that the RCMP released to the public. This uncensored version was available to the public, through Global News, CTV News, and the Vancouver Sun, for about an hour before being pulled and re-edited. It is not known the extent of the damage this mistake caused the undercover officer.
Read more about this topic: Robert Pickton
Famous quotes containing the words stay, final, murder and/or charges:
““If only I had a wife!” I used to think, “who could stay home and keep the children happy, why I could support six of them. A cinch.””
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“No sociologist ... should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time. One cannot with impunity try to transfer this task entirely to mechanical assistants if one wishes to figure something, even though the final result is often small indeed.”
—Max Weber (1864–1920)
“I walk toward one of our ponds; but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base? We walk to lakes to see our serenity reflected in them; when we are not serene, we go not to them. Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk. My thoughts are murder to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I have never injured anybody with a mordant poem; my
verse contains charges against nobody. Ingenuous, I have
shunned wit steeped in venom—not a letter of mine is dipped
in poisonous jest.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)