Prison drug smuggler seeks to appeal conviction

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This article was published 15/08/2018 (2073 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg woman who was sent to prison on a mandatory minimum sentence for smuggling drugs has taken her case to Manitoba’s top court for a second time.

Sandra Dignard — a 38-year-old single mother of four who was sentenced last year for sneaking 100 morphine pills into a Manitoba prison at the behest of her gangster boyfriend — appeared in the Court of Appeal Thursday to ask for more time to appeal her conviction.

Dignard was released from an Edmonton correctional institution last March. She’s arguing she didn’t get a fair trial because her former lawyer, who has since been convicted of impaired driving and no longer practises law, refused to launch a constitutional challenge against the mandatory-minimum sentence in her case — even though the sentencing judge admitted he didn’t want to send Dignard to jail.

The Crown is opposed to her request, and the appeal court judge, Justice Holly Beard, reserved her decision Thursday. It was Beard who ruled, last December, that Dignard wouldn’t be allowed to appeal the two-year mandatory minimum sentence she received for drug trafficking within a correctional institution. Beard decided the two-year sentence Dignard received was fit for the crime she committed.

With no chance of an appeal hearing on the two-year sentence, lawyer Zilla Jones launched an appeal on Dignard’s conviction — although she isn’t challenging the guilty verdict.

The alleged misconduct of her former lawyer, Steven Keesic, meant Dignard was prevented from trying to have the mandatory minimum sentence declared unconstitutional, Jones argued. An email exchange filed in support of Dignard’s appeal shows a lawyer from the Public Interest Law Centre offered to try to challenge the mandatory minimum in May 2017, before Dignard was sentenced, but Keesic didn’t act on it and stopped responding. Jones said Dignard didn’t know about the offer of outside legal help until it was too late.

“The trial was not fair, because it cannot be fair when a lawyer was not following instructions,” Jones told Beard, arguing Keesic went against Dignard’s wishes by not pursuing a constitutional challenge. She argued there is evidence Keesic was acting irrationally and using drugs around the time of Dignard’s sentencing.

The motion for leave to appeal the conviction was adjourned indefinitely last year. Jones brought it back to court this month.

There’s no legal reason to allow the appeal, Crown attorney Janna Hyman argued.

“What we have here at the end of the day: a fair trial, a fit sentence. I’m not standing here saying that I think that Mr. Keesic’s behaviour with respect to the constitutional challenge was anything that is good or right. That’s not what is in issue, though,” Hyman said.

“What she’s asking for is to have her conviction overturned without any complaint about what happened that led to her conviction. With all due respect to my friend’s position, that is simply something this court cannot do,” Hyman argued.

At Dignard’s trial in 2016, Dignard testified she smuggled the morphine under duress. Her ex-boyfriend, a Hells Angels prospect, testified for the defence that he asked Dignard to smuggle in the drugs during a 2012 conjugal visit to Stony Mountain, where he was an inmate.

Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Sheldon Lanchbery decided the case didn’t meet the legal test for committing a crime under duress. But before sentencing her, Lanchbery said he was “not a fan of” mandatory minimum sentences and was troubled “that in this particular case justice is not being done. However, under the circumstances, it’s the law of the land,” he said at Dignard’s sentencing in July 2017.

Results of a federal Department of Justice survey released last month found most respondents are opposed to mandatory minimum sentences, with 89 per cent of respondents saying judges should have the flexibility to impose lower sentences in certain cases.

One of the questions included in the online survey, which was posted after Dignard was sentenced last summer, appeared similar to her case. It asked whether a 36-year-old mother named Sarah, who was caught selling prescription opioids, should have been given a mandatory jail sentence even though she faced putting her two children in foster care because she was the sole provider for the family.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay