No formal acquittal for Romeo Phillion’s old murder charge

OTTAWA – A judge has decided that Romeo Phillion will not have the opportunity to formally be found not guilty of the 1967 killing of an Ottawa firefighter, instead upholding the Crown prosecutor’s right to withdraw the charge.

Phillion, 70, had been seeking to force the Crown to arraign him on the decades-old murder charge, for which he served 32 years in prison, in anticipation they would call no evidence against him and he would be acquitted of the charge.

The move came after Phillion’s 1972 conviction was overturned by the Ontario Court of Appeal last year after evidence came to light that he may have been stuck at a service station in Trenton, Ont., shortly before the killing of Leopold Roy.

A troubled and mentally ill drifter at the time, Phillion confessed to the crime after being arrested years later for robbing a taxi driver, although he quickly retracted that confession.

His lawyers argued in February that Phillion’s constitutional rights had been violated by a Crown prosecutor’s failure to disclose the potential alibi to them at the time of the trial.

Ottawa’s Crown attorney Hilary McCormack argued Phillion’s alibi wasn’t airtight and the prosecutor did nothing wrong by not revealing the Trenton alibi.

In a 35-page written decision released Thursday, Ontario Superior Court Justice Lynn Ratushny found that to give Phillion what he wanted would be an "intrusion upon prosecutorial discretion" in a situation where there hasn’t been an abuse of power.

Instead, she wrote, Phillion’s case involves a past "miscarriage of justice" that has already been remedied by the appeal court ruling quashing the conviction.

"The result is that while there are grounds upon which to disagree with the way in which the Crown has chosen to end this case, the very essence of the principles of independence that underwrite prosecutorial discretion preclude me, and correctly so in my view, from interfering with the way in which the Crown has chosen to exercise its discretion," she wrote.

In February, Phillion said that allowing the Crown to simply withdraw the charge denied him an opportunity to "clear his name."

Phillion vowed to "pitch a tent on Parliament Hill" if he was denied the opportunity to be found not guilty.

"I’m not a killer, far from being one. I might not be an angel, but I am no killer," Phillion said outside of court at the time. "I want that cloud off of me. I won’t stop until it’s done, my name cleared."

aseymour@thecitizen.canwest.com