Up at 720 Bay Street, home of the Ontario Crown law office, there's not a whole lot of carrying the triumphant about on shoulders that goes on, at least not when it comes to police prosecutions.
Prosecutions against individual police officers, especially in fatal shootings, historically have rarely succeeded, it's widely believed, because juries tend to believe police officers and to give them the benefit of the doubt.
But yesterday was the second time in two years that an Ontario Superior Court judge has thrown out serious criminal charges in a major police corruption case.
This time, the case stopped in its tracks by Madam Justice Bonnie Croll involved three Toronto police officers, notably Bill McCormack (the son of the former Toronto Chief William McCormack) and former Toronto Police Association president Rick McIntosh.
Both men, as well as Constable George Kouroudis, were charged in May of 2004 with breach of trust and obstructing justice offences for allegedly taking bribes from nightclub owners in downtown Toronto in exchange for either help obtaining liquor licences or getting protection from police enforcement.
Last year, it was Mr. Justice Ian Nordheimer who put the brakes to what was considered the largest police corruption case in Canada and an investigation that altogether spanned a decade - criticizing what he called "the glacial progress" of the prosecution and squarely blaming the special prosecutions unit at 720 Bay for "sitting on its hands rather than actively assisting the investigation."
And yet Judge Nordheimer was soundly reversed just this fall by the Ontario Court of Appeal, which ordered a new trial for the five former members of the Toronto force's long-disbanded central field command drug squad.
The cases are similar only in that the heart of both is the issue of Crown disclosure: that is, the prosecutorial obligation to give in timely fashion to lawyers for the accused men all the relevant evidence police have gathered against them.
But if the law on the prosecution's disclosure obligation is settled, the law on how to count any delay in doing it and how to weigh the impact of that delay - balancing the societal right to see justice done against the right of an individual to a speedy trial - is ever-changing and, in layman's terms, all over the map.
In one corner is the recent Ontario appeal court decision in the case of John Schertzer and the other former Toronto drug squad officers, where the court said Judge Nordheimer was, first, wrong to blame the delay on disclosure and, second, didn't expressly identify the causes of the delay.
Judge Croll, who painstakingly identified virtually each day of the delay in the McCormack case and mostly blamed the prosecution for it, would seem to have avoided that pitfall.
But in the other corner is another decision this year from the Supreme Court of Canada in a case called Godin, where the judges found that prosecutors were responsible for most of the delay and concluded sharply that, "The accused was entitled to timely disclosure and he did not receive it."
That was itself an appeal of another Ontario Court of Appeal decision, where there was but one dissenting judge who held that the charges against the accused - in this instance of sexual assault, unlawful confinement and threatening to kill his ex-girlfriend - should be stayed. The Supreme Court agreed with him, overturned the majority, and restored the stay of proceedings the appeal court had set aside.
It was all so much simpler before 1982, when the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was first proclaimed.
It's Section 11 (b) of the Charter which guarantees Canadians trial within a reasonable time, which is at the heart of the matter.
In 1981, the Supreme Court wrote in a decision called Rothman that, "It must also be borne in mind that the investigation of crime and the detection of criminals is not a game to be governed by the Marquess of Queensbury rules.
"The authorities, in dealing with shrewd and often sophisticated criminals, must sometimes of necessity resort to tricks or other forms of deceit and should not as a rule be hampered in their work."
And it is an alleged bit of what Judge Croll called "disingenuous" conduct on the part of the police - Inspector Bryce Evans, the officer in charge of the McCormack investigation - which was yesterday found to be the pivotal cause of virtually all the delay in the case against former constable McCormack, former police union boss McIntosh and Constable Kouroudis.
Insp. Evans decided, early on in what was called Project Bar District, to grant confidential informer status to a man named Neil Peluso, a person, according to Judge Croll, was "alleged to be a known member of organized crime."
He did this, Insp. Evans testified, as an "investigative technique;" he wanted Mr. Peluso, who was a target of a larger police probe into organized crime called Project ORA, to "heat up the wires" and get the targets in Project Bar District talking.
Only at the preliminary hearing did Insp. Evans admit that this was a ruse or a trick, meaning that Mr. Peluso wasn't a proper confidential informant, or C.I., but rather a police agent - and thus wasn't entitled to anonymity or the informant's privilege.
That, according to Judge Croll's analysis, was the original sin and from it, she found, most of the delay followed. Insp. Evans's mistake, in other words, was the piece which caused all the other dominos to fall - forcing one of the defence lawyers to withdraw from the case because of a conflict she hadn't recognized, causing a delay; necessitating all kinds of legal arguments over whether Mr. Peluso really was a C.I. or an agent, which in turn ate up all sorts of court time; resulting in another lawyer having to be replaced because the schedule was now far behind, which meant the case fell further behind, etc.
On and on it went, with Judge Croll eventually deciding that Insp. Evans' "ruse" led to adjournments and lengthy legal arguments, and that the resulting prejudice to the three accused men was extraordinary.
"While the Crown submits that the allegations strike at the heart of the administration of justice," the judge concluded, "so too does the inordinate delay that has occurred."