BURST
A B.C. Supreme Court judge has ordered a killer’s return to a minimum-security prison after he was moved because of allegations of an improper relationship with a staff member.
Justice Eric Gottardi said that the decision to transfer Treyvonne Willis to medium-security Mountain prison in the Fraser Valley earlier this year was unreasonable.
The move happened after a staff member at the minimum-security William Head Institution on Vancouver Island reported seeing Willis hug and kiss a prison manager in a locked building in February.
Willis said the kiss never happened, though he admitted he hugged the manager — identified only as CM — but only to comfort her after she disclosed some personal problems.
Willis, convicted in 2015 of a contracted murder in Winnipeg, filed a petition against both Mountain and William Head prisons, asking for a judicial review of his move.
Gottardi agreed with Willis’s assertions that his denial of the kiss was not addressed by prison officials before he was involuntarily transferred to Mountain on an emergency basis.
“It seems as though the warden may have disbelieved Mr. Willis’ denials about the kissing and accepted the observation of the correctional officer. There is no discussion about the reliability of either version of events or an articulation of any reasons for rejecting Mr. Willis’ narrative,” Gottardi said. “These omissions clearly detract from the intelligibility of the decision.”
Nor did the warden acknowledge the power imbalance between Willis and CM, Gottardi said in a written ruling released this week.
“The warden’s conclusion that Mr. Willis should have brought his concerns about the relationship forward to staff are unreasonable, in that they fail to grapple with the existence of a significant power imbalance between Mr. Willis and the impugned staff member,” he said.
Gottardi said while the transfer decision focused on Willis’s behaviour, “it was not reasonable for the warden to conclude that it was incumbent on Mr. Willis to establish boundaries to protect himself against a senior staff member from behaving in an unprofessional manner.”
Correctional Service Canada refused to comment earlier on Postmedia’s questions about the status of CM’s employment. A source at the time said she was escorted from the property after the incident with Willis.
Willis was convicted of first-degree murder after admitting to police that he stabbed Kaila Tran, 26, outside her St. Vital apartment on June 20, 2012.
In a videotaped confession, he said he had been hired to do the hit but refused to say by whom. Police had alleged Tran’s ex-boyfriend was behind the slaying, but a first-degree-murder charge against him was later stayed.
Willis lost in the Manitoba Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear his case.
Blueksy: @kimbolan.bsky.social