A distraught aunt of a teen killed on an\u00a0Edmonton\u00a0transit platform yelled profanities at a judge Wednesday, as he dismissed the family\u2019s request to review a decision not to lay charges in the death.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was never a chance in this court!\u201d Chasity Phillips shouted at Court of King\u2019s Bench Justice Wayne Renke. \u201cYou are corrupt.\u201d<\/p>\n
The family of 13-year-old Eric Omeasoo requested a judicial review of the police decision not to charge a man in the stabbing of the teen at the MacEwan light rail platform in February of last year.<\/p>\n
The family was also denied a judicial review of the decision by Crown prosecutors.<\/p>\n
Court heard that Michael Lucier stabbed Eric in the chest after an altercation with a group of youth. While several of them were charged with attacking Lucier and his wife, police didn\u2019t pursue charges against the man, saying evidence pointed to him acting in self-defence.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Renke dismissed the request for a judicial review, saying the boy\u2019s family didn\u2019t provide evidence of abuse of process in the case.<\/p>\n
He said the family would have to prove police used unreasonable discretion in deciding not to pursue charges against Lucier.<\/p>\n
The judge said evidence investigators had, including video surveillance from the transit station that partially showed what happened, was enough to support that police exercised reasonable discretion.<\/p>\n
For his decision to dismiss the request for a review against the Crown, Renke said prosecutors only provided an opinion to police that chances of a conviction were low based on the evidence at the time.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is a general rule in Alberta that police, not the Crown, decide to lay charges,\u201d the judge said. \u201cThe Crown cannot direct the police not to lay any charge.\u201d<\/p>\n
Renke said there was no evidence that prosecutors acted with \u201cflagrant impropriety\u201d or engaged in conduct \u201cbordering on corruption\u201d in providing their recommendation to police.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The boy\u2019s family said outside court that they would continue to fight for justice.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201c(The decision) sends a message that it\u2019s OK to kill our children, it\u2019s OK for the police and the Crown to do whatever they want,\u201d Phillips said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI realized today that no matter what we provided to the court, there was never a chance at justice for Eric in this courtroom.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
She said she wasn\u2019t sure what more legally her family could do, but \u201cwe will not rest until the world knows Eric\u2019s truth.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A distraught aunt of a teen killed on an\u00a0Edmonton\u00a0transit platform yelled profanities at a judge Wednesday, as he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":500146,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194294],"tags":[49,48,23752],"class_list":{"0":"post-500145","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-edmonton","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-edmonton"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500145\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/500146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}