Quebec’s police watchdog has announced the province’s Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DPCP) has decided not to file charges against Sûreté du Québec (SQ) officers in connection with a Mar. 2024 incident in which a woman fell unconscious while being detained at the Campbell’s Bay police station and died in hospital days later.
“Based on the information obtained during the investigation, it can be concluded that the obligations of the police officers and the director of the police department involved . . . were met,” said a July 10 press release from the Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes (BEI), which conducted the investigation into the incident, and later provided its findings to the DPCP for its analysis.
The BEI’s investigation, launched on the afternoon of Mar. 1, 2024, only a few hours after the incident occurred, provided a detailed account of the events that lead to the woman’s death, which was published in the DPCP’s press release.
According to the report, the woman was arrested by SQ police officers during a search conducted at her home the morning of Mar. 1, and subsequently taken to the Campbell’s Bay police station.
After being placed in an interrogation room, the woman asked for her medication, which was still at her home. When an officer brought her the medication, she took it and placed a few tablets in her pockets, which an officer then retrieved, along with the medication container.
For the next 40 or so minutes, the woman was alone in the interrogation room, and was described as screaming and banging on the table. The report indicates she appeared to convulse and fall to the floor, breathing heavily.
An officer then returned to the room to find the woman on the ground, and a second officer helped sit her down on a chair, noting she was minimally conscious and not responding to the agents’ questions. At that point the paramedics were called.
When the paramedics arrived, the woman convulsed again. The paramedics transported her to hospital.
The woman was pronounced dead on Mar. 4, 2024, the autopsy revealing the woman had died as a result of “polyintoxication to drugs of abuse,” according to the DPCP.
The BEI’s report to the DPCP contained no information about the location of the officers or their duties during this period.
This is because as of Apr. 2024, police officers are no longer required by law to prepare a report on the facts of the incident being investigated by the BEI.
While the BEI had already obtained the police officers’ reports in the Campbell’s Bay investigation two months earlier, it withdrew them from the final file submitted to the DPCP.
Using the above account, as well as additional information from the investigation, the DPCP analyzed the incident, ultimately determining that the police officers would not be charged with a criminal offence.
The report explained its decision to not file charges against the officers, saying that under Section 215(c) of the Criminal Code, officers must provide the “necessities of life” to those in custody, including medical care.
“It is an offence to fail, without lawful excuse, to perform that duty, and if the failure to perform the duty endangers the life of the person or is likely to cause permanent harm to the health of the person,” reads the report.
To file charges against the officers, the DPCP would have had to prove beyond reasonable doubt the following items: that the officer was under a legal obligation to provide the necessaries of life while the person was in his custody; that the police officer failed to provide the necessities of life; that the officer failed to provide the necessities of life endangered the person’s life or was likely to cause permanent harm to the person’s health; and that the officer’s conduct represented a marked departure from the conduct of a reasonable police officer in circumstances where it was objectively foreseeable that the failure to provide medical care to the person endangered his life or was likely to cause permanent harm to that person’s health.
The report says that throughout the intervention officers remained respectful towards the woman, and that the officer only became aware of her precarious state of health upon re-entering the interrogation room, at which point he went to her aid and contacted the emergency services.
“The available evidence does not support a finding of a marked departure from the behaviour of a reasonable police officer in the same circumstances, nor does it support a finding that they failed to provide the necessities of life for a dependent.
Consequently, following its analysis, the DPCP is of the opinion that the evidence does not reveal the commission of a criminal offence by the SQ officers involved in this event,” concluded the report.
