Court to rule on admissibility of Curtis Sagmoen search warrant evidence

The justice in the Curtis Sagmoen uttering threats case is expected to rule Monday on a legal issue that could see evidence excluded from trial.

The North Okanagan man has pleaded not guilty to five charges in connection with accusations he threatened a sex-trade worker with a shotgun in August 2017.

The evidence, that could be excluded, was collected during a search of his parent’s North Okanagan property.

Sagmoen’s defence lawyer, Lisa Helps, argued this week there are problems with the document that police used to get a search warrant in the case.

Helps argued the police application for the warrant was “geared to persuade,” rather than provide full disclosure, and if the problematic portions of the application weren’t included, the search warrant would never have been granted in the first place.

If defence does persuade the court that the warrant should be thrown out, it would likely preclude any evidence obtained under that warrant from being used at trial.

However, on Friday, Crown counsel defended the police application for the warrant, arguing it does not contain misleading information and provided ample evidence to allow the warrant to be issued.

Prosecutor Simone McCallum argued it was completely reasonable for police to look at Sagmoen as a possible suspect, and to believe that the items they were searching for — including computers, cellphones and a firearm — could be on the property.

McCallum said evidence that pointed towards Sagmoen as a suspect included information from neighbours and motor vehicle and firearms licensing records, which provided a credible basis for investigators to believe that it was Sagmoen that the alleged victim had arranged to meet.

1:31 New evidence released in trial of Curtis Sagmoen

Crown also pointed out that Sagmoen had previously acknowledged to police that he had a history of being in contact with prostitutes, and that there were suggestions he had used the area where the uttering threats incident is alleged to have taken place to meet up with women in the past.

Defence council took issue with the police warrant application’s use of what, Helps argued, amounted to neighbourhood gossip and the lack of information provided about how police identified Sagmoen.

Crown conceded that the physical description of Sagmoen in the warrant application is limited, but argued that even without that information the warrant could have issued, as there was no necessity for police to see Sagmoen on the property to get a warrant to search it.

McCallum also rebutted defence’s argument that the search warrant application relied on neighbourhood gossip, arguing that police had a duty to include what they had heard from neighbours, as it was part of the investigation.

Crown argued it was up to the issuing justice to determine what weight to put on the neighbours’ statements.

Helps also questioned police attempts, in seeking the warrant, to suggest Sagmoen could be linked to text messages received by the complainant because of the use or misuse of the word “there” in texts.

2:59 First look at interrogation video of Curtis Sagmoen

Helps told the court that the link police were trying to make was based on a perceived misuse of the word “there” or “their” in one of Sagmoen’s text messages and in a text message received by the complainant.

Defence argued that an example doesn’t prove Sagmoen was texting the complainant, as “there” and “their” are frequently misused homonyms.

However, Crown submitted that while the texts weren’t a “smoking gun,” the idiosyncratic overuse of the word “there” had come to the attention of investigators, and they had the right to include it in their warrant application as another “bread crumb” of information that would allow the issuing justice to make up their own mind about whether a warrant should be issued.

Madame Justice Beames will take the weekend to consider these divergent arguments and decide if the police application for a warrant in this case was problematic enough for the warrant to be tossed out.

That decision is expected on Monday morning.