Police must investigate native's death: Lawyer

Brian Sinclair is still invisible.

How else to explain that almost two years have passed since the native homeless man was ignored for 34 hours in the ER of a major Winnipeg hospital and yet local police have still never conducted a criminal investigation into his tragic death?

Prominent criminal lawyer Clayton Ruby may live far away in Toronto, but that lack of police action left him no choice but to speak out.

“It broke my heart,” he said of Sinclair’s death in September 2008. “This is Winnipeg of 50 years ago, this is not the Winnipeg of today. This is quite disgusting.”

And while an inquest has been called, Ruby said it is “both inexplicable and shocking” that Winnipeg Police Service have never investigated what the province’s Chief Medical Officer has called an “entirely preventable” death.

“The police are aware of this obligation,” Ruby told reporters at his Toronto office. “They’re not dumb. They figure they can get away with not doing an investigation in this case because of who it was and the circumstances.”

Get away with it because in our society, Sinclair was as marginalized as one could be.

The 45-year-old was Aboriginal and homeless; he was a former solvent addict and speech impaired. He was mentally disabled and a double amputee after losing both legs to frostbite from sleeping on the street.

A community health clinic doctor had referred him to the ER and he arrived alone at the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre suffering from a simple bladder infection and a clogged catheter.

After speaking to someone at the triage desk, Sinclair waited patiently in the ER for medical help. But that help never came.

Despite concerns expressed by at least one other emergency patient and by security staff, no doctor or nurse ever came to Sinclair’s aid during the entire 34 hours he sat slowly and quietly dying in his wheelchair from a very treatable ailment.

At one point, Sinclair was vomiting and in obvious distress and still he was ignored.

When they finally noticed him a day and a half after he’d arrived, he was already dead. A simple dose of antibiotics would have saved his life.

Unbelievably, an internal review concluded that no one from the hospital should be disciplined. Sinclair was still invisible to them.

So his distraught family asked Ruby to offer a pro bono legal opinion on the possible criminal liability in the case.

The lawyer concluded that “on the face of it,” there appear to be two criminal charges that police could lay against the Winnipeg hospital and/or its employees: criminal negligence causing death and the failure to provide the necessaries of life.

If the hospital were found guilty, Ruby said they could be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars “to make it clear that it is unacceptable.”

His legal opinion was backed up by two international human rights experts, the National Law Centre on Homelessness and Poverty in Washington, D.C. as well as a group of 26 Canadian criminal law academics who said Winnipeg Police have a “moral and legal obligation” to conduct a full criminal investigation.

“Unfortunately,” said Prof. David Tanovich of the University of Windsor’s faculty of law, “it stands out as yet another example of the failure of privileged institutions in Canada to protect Aboriginals from harm and to investigate harm caused to them.”

In response, Winnipeg police chief Keith McCaskill issued a statement saying they were never called in by the office of the chief medical examiner because there was never any suggestion of criminal wrongdoing.

Ruby admitted that he doesn’t know of a previous case where a hospital or its medical staff faced criminal charges for neglect, but added: “I’m 68-years-old and I’ve never heard of a case where someone has died after 34 hours of waiting in a an emergency room. It’s just shocking.”

He called on the Canadian public to pressure the police to do the right thing: investigate and lay criminal charges if warranted.

“Winnipeg police are not inept, they’re a modern police force in a major city,” Ruby insisted. “This is just inexplicable. Fifty years ago, they might have said, ‘Oh, it’s just an Indian, who cares?’ or ‘He was just a cripple, he doesn’t matter.’ But we don’t do that.”

Or do we?