The lawyer for a man convicted for his role in the COVID-19 border blockade at Coutts, Alta., urged Appeal Court judges Thursday to toss out the verdict, saying the trial judge made irreconcilable errors.
Katherin Beyak, the lawyer for Chris Carbert, listed eight grounds of appeal and argued that the trial judge erred in failing to exclude evidence from the jury obtained from an improperly issued search warrant.
The warrant was offside, Beyak said, because it claimed it was to obtain information and data related to the illegal protest at the border but was really tied to a search for weapons.
“This is all a ruse,” Beyak told the three-member panel of judges.
“They were never searching for documents or data.
“That’s not the true intention of their search. They are trying to get firearms through the back door. They wrote (they were looking) for documents and data only to find guns.”
Justice Josh Hawkes cautioned Beyak that she needed detail and strong arguments to make her case.
“What I would like the focus to be on (is) what the findings were by the trial judge (and) if there is an assertion that finding is initiated by a powerful and overriding error,” Hawkes said.
The Court of Appeal of Alberta typically reserves its decisions.
Carbert and his co-accused, Anthony Olienick, were found guilty by a jury last year and sentenced to 6 1/2 years for mischief and possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose. Olienick was also convicted of possessing a pipe bomb.
Jurors found them not guilty on a charge of conspiring to kill RCMP officers.
They were granted almost four years’ credit for the time they spent in custody awaiting trial.
The men are asked the court to overturn their convictions on the weapons charge and, if that fails, to reduce their sentences.
Carbert sat in the front row of the courtroom surrounded by supporters, while Olienick was a few metres away in the prisoner’s box.
The men were arrested in early 2022, after police found a cache of weapons, ammunition and body armour near the blockade at the Canada-U.S. border crossing.
They were among multiple people charged for their roles at the blockade, which halted traffic for two weeks in a protest against COVID-19 rules and vaccine mandates.
The clash over COVID-19 health mandates and individual freedoms polarized public opinion during the pandemic, resulting in a number of demonstrations across the country, including the one at Coutts.
Anger continued to resonate during the trial for Olienick and Carbert.
Four days into the trial in early June, jurors parking their cars in front of the courthouse were greeted with a message scrawled in chalk on a sidewalk: “840 Days Plus Already, Let the Coutts Boys Out of Jail Now.”