BURST
A lawyer has launched an appeal of Ibrahim Ali’s first-degree murder conviction in the rape and killing of a 13-year-old Burnaby girl, alleging 45 errors by the trial judge.
The appeal, coming after one of B.C.’s longest murder trials, is so complex that the lawyer has been granted the right to file reasons in a document three times longer than normally allowed in B.C. Appeal Court.
The court’s ruling called any extension beyond 30 pages for the factum “exceptional” and only “granted sparingly” and said its immediate response was to call lawyer Timothy Russell’s request for 150 pages “disappointing.”
But after receiving a 148-page draft and acknowledging the complexity of the case, “and the arguments that are to be advanced,” Justice Paul Riley granted an extension.
“I am satisfied, given the length of the trial proceedings, and the size or volume of the record on appeal, that leave to file a factum more than the 30-page limit should be granted,” he wrote.
But he limited the factum to 90 pages, suggesting the draft could be condensed.
Ali was convicted of the 2017 killing of the 13-year-old girl in 2023 after an eight-month trial that had been scheduled for three months. He was sentenced in June 2024 to life in prison without chance of parole for 25 years.
The jury took less than 24 hours to reach its verdict at the end of the trial that had been adjourned multiple times for various reasons, including Ali’s mental and physical health, the death of an expert witness, COVID-19 and other illnesses among the jurors, and threats of violence against Ali’s lawyers.
Almost two years after Ali was sentenced, Russell launched the appeal, alleging B.C. Supreme Court Justice Lance Bernard made 45 errors in nine generalized grounds of appeal. That had been pared down from 25 generalized grounds of appeal, according to the ruling.
Riley also said Russell had summarized the length and complexity of the trial by listing the 400 total court days, 29 voir dire hearingss, 246 exhibits, 79 rulings totalling 980 pages, and 19,875 pages of transcripts.
But regarding the decisions, Riley said “one might question their bearing on the result” of the verdict, including those related to publication bans.
There was a mandatory publication ban issued on the girl’s name and any information that could identify her, and another on any “information regarding the circumstances of the death of trial witness Tracy Pickett.”
Pickett, an expert witness for the prosecution, didn’t show up to finish her cross-examination by a defence lawyer, and the judge later told them it was because she had died. He told them to disregard her testimony and not to speculate about her death.
“On its face it is hard to see how those grounds (regarding a publication ban) bear on the soundness of the verdict, and there is, of course, no jurisdiction in this court to entertain an appeal from a decision granting or refusing a publication ban,” wrote Riley.
“However, counsel for Mr. Ali intends to argue that the publication ban had some bearing on the fairness of the proceedings and apprehension of bias in respect of the trial judge, which arguments are said to support various remedies sought on the conviction appeal,” he wrote.
Riley further wrote that he didn’t have “any jurisdiction to address the merits of the appeal” and his ruling pertained only to the application to exceed the factum length.
This was the second appeal of Ali’s murder conviction.
His trial lawyer, Kevin McCullough, tried and failed two years ago to have the conviction tossed because of unreasonable delays in the trial process. He filed his Jordan application, named after a Supreme Court of Canada precedent that limits the time between the laying of charges and completion of a trial to 30 months, based on the 63 months Ali spent in custody awaiting trial.
McCullough blamed the delay on the court’s mismanagement and the prosecution’s “trickling disclosure.”
But the prosecutor said Ali’s health problems, dozens of applications filed by defence and other reasons, including those caused by COVID, were to blame. He said the trial would have otherwise taken 25 months.
Riley gave Russell until the end of the month to file his 90-page factum and the Crown until September to file its responding factum.
The Appeal Court hearing is scheduled for five days in December.