Slashdot Mirror
'G20 Geek' Byron Sonne Cleared of Explosives Charges
New submitter davegravy writes "Byron Sonne, the Toronto-based security consultant, chemistry hobbyist, and geek who was arrested leading up to the Toronto G-20 for alleged plans to bomb the event, has been found not guilty of all charges. Sonne was held in prison for 11 months without receiving bail, and the ruling comes two years after his arrest. Sonne is considered by many in the Toronto security community as a champion of civil rights and a sharp critic of security theatre."
Those who oppose security theater are often it's first victims.
At least he got a trial.
[The Universe] has gone offline.
do they pay you back for time served? do you get a rain check?
An update to the story:
Sonne has already announced plans to sue the Crown and Toronto Police
I read this as "D20 Geek" - looks like he rolled his saving throw!
>> 'G20 Geek' Byron Sonne Cleared of Explosives Charges
He lost 11 months of freedom and overall two years of his life fighting bullshit charges. He had to move in with his parents, his girlfriend left him (she got arrested too), I presume he's no longer employed, and two years later he has nothing to show for it but a hollow victory in court. The government got what they wanted out of him: He's a warning to others of what they can do to you even if you've done nothing wrong.
bah.
Probably not as much as you are implying.
Our Canadian Friends to the North are more in common with the United States Culturally then you would like to believe. And it isn't as much from the U.S. Forcing them the Canadians take pride in their differences, as do the Americans.
Both of our Justice Systems are Modeled of the English system. So it isn't to far to expect that the way we handle justice isn't that different.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I think it should be clear that we need anonymity systems, when comments made on Twitter and Flickr are used to justfiy ruining a person's life like this. It is a sad thing to say, but we need the tools developed to help dissidents in China to protect people here in the "free world."
Palm trees and 8
Good luck to him -- even if he waits longer to get a jury trial, the judge will still set damages and cannot assess anything resembling punative damages under Canadian law. At most he will get actual, proveable damages, two years salary (should try for overtime:). And might actually get costs awarded against him if he rejects a higher "paid-into-court" settlement offer.
The Crown alleged he had all the necessary ingredients to build a homemade bomb
I don't know anyone that DOESN'T.
If someone keeps you working for them 24/7 for two years, that should be one hell of an overtime bonus.
I figured Canadians would have inherited a British sensibility for paying people who were unfairly imprisoned without fighting it. Of course, the news stories I've read like that from England may have given me an overly sunny impression of their approach. It just always made sense to me that if the government should fuck up your life for any significant period of time, that they compensate you for it as best they can.
apparently while there's no law that would force unjust imprisonment to have a compensation by default in canada, the courts can find it appropriate and do it anyways.
story at http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2011/04/14/17995011.html has a list of some large compensations.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
obviously she wanted out and probably thought he was guilty and this was a good excuse. Way to support your significant other/spouse.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
So how much influence did the USA have in this whole farce?
I suspect not very much. He insulted the police ("Bacon on wheels", for bicycle cops), belittled their efforts in security ("security theatre"), and tweeted about how a security fence could be climbed. Apparently, he also taunted a starving unchained dog, the unfeeling bastard! I'm still trying to read about that last one.
Obviously, he's a dangerous malcontented civil libertarian who refuses to follow orders of the authorities, and he knows stuff they never will understand. I'm surprised they couldn't hang him up on IP theft too. "He's got a DVD burner in his computer!"
I doubt the USA could have added anything more substantial that could possibly make this clusterfuck worse.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I'm afraid you do have an overly sunny impression of our approach here in England.
I was a witness in court a while back. It was a simple trial related to a motoring accident, which would take only a few hours. It had been aborted on one occasion a few months after the event in question, reasonably enough IMHO because there wasn't enough time left at the end of the day to be sure of hearing the case fully in one session. It was then tried on a different day, several months later still.
The defendant was found not guilty. In their summing up, the magistrates criticised the police report that was given as evidence, and noted that evidence by one of the prosecution's own witnesses was a major factor in the not guilty decision. In short, the magistrates did not seem to have a very high opinion at all of the case that had been made by the prosecution.
As a witness, I was entitled to some basic cost-of-living expenses for my trouble, and in practice my employer had paid me my normal wage despite missing the two days of work. However, I discovered later that the defendant (who, remember, was found not guilty, and had presumably already had about a year of stress since the accident with the case hanging over them) was entitled to nothing by way of compensation for either the lost time or the reduced quality of life.
It turns out that in England, you can have your day in court -- in fact, you might not get much choice about it, and it might be more than a day -- but only at your own expense. It's no wonder that so many people pay up the fixed penalty fines for traffic offences they cannot possibly have committed, if it would cost them more than the fine to take time off and travel to a faraway court near where the alleged incident took place in order to defend themselves.
It's a shame. I think rules that mean you can lose out even if you have done nothing wrong bring the entire justice system into disrepute. It's not as obvious as a couple of recent high profile cases when someone died after the police made a mistake, but in a way this sort of widespread, low-level abuse is just as insidious, and the kind of middle ground that we're talking about in TFA is the next logical step.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Nice, but these are only ~0.4 M$/y which looks like 2x overtime even while sleeping, totalling 10x salary.
Canada/UK/oz/... rely _very_ heavily on the Crown (civil servants) and even company officers in general doing the "Right Thing", and being very embarrassed otherwise. Unfortunately, this has been eroded by US movies/TV.
US/state/corp officials derive their power from election, and are otherwise devoid of civic duty. So they need hard slaps from courts.
"'G20 Geek' Byron Sonne Cleared Explosive Charges"
I thought the guy foiled some kind of terrorist plot by disarming a bomb
Or as we say over here in the colonies, "You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride."
Good luck to him -- even if he waits longer to get a jury trial, the judge will still set damages and cannot assess anything resembling punative damages under Canadian law. At most he will get actual, proveable damages, two years salary (should try for overtime:). And might actually get costs awarded against him if he rejects a higher "paid-into-court" settlement offer.
His wife left him and took the house. It sounds like damages will be significant.
The mere fact of innocence doesn't reduce the civic lesson value of this entire episode: You can be imprisoned for nearly a year, held almost incommunicado, and lose your most important personal relationships, simply because you're loudly opposed to the mechanisms of state security. Your "acquittal" does nothing to ameliorate that. Even if you win, you will still have lost, and nothing will change.
Well, we can hope the police spokeman was wrong about the last part.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Sonne, the judge said, felt “very strongly” about his wife.
“I do not believe he would have done anything to risk injury to her or worse,” Ms. Spies said.
The couple has since split up, something Mr. Sonne noted poignantly after the verdict.
“It would be nice to walk out of the courthouse into her arms, but that’s just not going to happen.”
Consider that they've already done enough destruction to the person's family - the law enforcement have done enough to not need to go for the coup de grace and "convict" him.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That's why the 11 months, that's why the easily refuted charges, the pointless lying by the security forces. They aren't punishing him as much as they are demonstrating what they can do to YOU or YOU or YOU, if you get lippy.
It's working. People are shutting up. You can't meter what ain't there, but public disagreement with the established police state is muted by these endless arrests. People don't want to go into debt for the rest of their lives, lose their jobs and their families, just to say "I disagree."
Stay tuned for Rahm Emmanuel's series of lessons in Chicago later this week. It's Tuesday, and already the security forces are running helicopters overhead. We have LDAPs! Let the schoolin' begin.
So what are are YOU doing about? Or are YOU the sort of coward that YOU presume the rest of us to be?
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
And, if you get a situation like this, time in prison awaiting trial counts as 'time served' to calculate your sentence if you're found guilty, but it's not 'wrongful imprisonment' if you're found not guilty. The only argument to support this deplorable situation? "It would cost the public purse too much to compensate people".
I didn't see any evidence in his post which would suggest that he was saying you or anybody else was behaving in a cowardly manner. He was just pointing out the psychological effect of intimidation tactics.
...any monetary awards will just nickle-and-dime the taxpayer
That is exactly the problem. In a case like this, the civil servants responsible should be personally liable for any judgement he wins. That means everyone: the arresting officer, the police detectives who carried out the investigation, everyone involved in the prosecutors office, *and* any and all judges involved in denying him bail and drawing out the court process.
As it is, all of these people can just shrug, say "everyone makes mistakes" or even "he deserved it", and go on to do it to the next person.
Personal liability.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I have a friend who was involved in a motorcycle crash during a trip to see the 1999 eclipse in Cornwall - a car in front pulled an emergency stop on an empty straight road and he hit the back of it (at about 10mph) - there was no visible damage to the car and the driver admitted he stopped as his wife shouted stop as she had seen a pretty cottage she wanted a photo of. They exchanged details and he went on his way - the next he knew was he had a summons to appear in court in Cornwall for failure to report and accident and leaving the scene of an accident. This was because said wife had decided to try for a whiplash compensation from her insurers.
Although he lives 300 miles away the court would not allow it to be tried locally, he twice took 2 days off work to turn up and be told the case was adjourned. Both time he needed to pay for a hotel overnight. On the 3rd time he sat around all day only for the magistrate to throw out the case within 5 minutes as being laughable and actually suggested that the wife should be investigated for insurance fraud.
All in it cost him 1800 miles of petrol, 3 nights of hotel stays 6 days leave and he still got 4 points on his licence for "undue care and attention" as driving into the back of another vehicle is always your fault. Plus as he only had 3rd party fire and theft he had to pay for the repairs to the tank of his bike and exhaust (another £500 even though only cosmetic) and he lost his no claims.
The fuynny thing is the police will not attend even an accident unless there is an injury involved and just give you an incident number over the phone
I hope he sues them for a Bazillions dollars!
Oh wait that's my money.... sigh.