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'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.
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
Worse yet. They destroyed his life as he knew it. He lost his house, job, and wife on top of 2 years of unfounded persecution. Yes, persecution.
If you read the reports of the court proceedings (https://github.com/colah/ByronTrialNotes) it is very alarming how technologically inept the authorities were in this case and how they ignored Occam's Razor to nail this guy. And these are the people that judge and impose laws on us techies. EXTREMELY worrying.
The court found he was not trying to bomb the government. After 11 months in jail for no reason, he certainly has the motive to do it now.
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.
The legal system is a street gang. They are allowed to run rampant, and when they "accidentally" do this to an innocent person they are not liable for anything at all.
The Legal system should be required to pay for 2X the actual damages caused for every innocent person railroaded. Sat in jail for 3 years and lost your job? If you made $50K a year, you get $100K for every year you would have had that job. so call it a cool $20 million that is tax free and call it fair.
On top of this, law enforcement found to have been overzealous lose their jobs and are personally liable. Cops need to be afraid of making a mistake.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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 prosecutors weren't inept. They knew exactly what they were doing and have managed to pull it off brilliantly.
They wanted to make an example of him and scare anyone else from even thinking about talking against the government.
They didn't need to win, they just needed to drag things out and hurt the guy as much as possible. The more inept the acted the better off they could do that.
these are the people that judge and impose laws on us techies
You are not "supposed" to be a techie; you are "supposed" to do technical work at your job, then go home, drink beer, and watch whatever propaganda is on TV. Advanced technology is "supposed" to be the secret, non-disclosable lore of corporations, not something you just play with in your home.
What, did you not get the memo?
Palm trees and 8
it is very alarming how technologically inept the authorities were in this case and how they ignored Occam's Razor to nail this guy.
Well, duh, Occam's Razor was banned along with nail clippers and shaving cream exceeding 100 ml.
And these are the people that judge and impose laws on us techies.
Hopefully those who impose laws and those who judge are two separate branches of government, even in Canada.
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.
I sort of agree and sort of disagree.
Should the police be afraid of making mistakes? Depends on the mistake.
If they cause grievous harm to someone - yes, that they should be afraid of. Arresting someone who is innocent or is later found not guilty - no.
The prosecutors, however, should be held to a much higher standard, as they are the ones who are ultimately responsible. I.e. if they don't feel a case is strong enough, they'll have to release the suspect.
And in cases like this, where someone is found not guilty after having spent 11 months in jail, I wouldn't mind seeing the prosecutor responsible spend, say half that time behind bars for contempt of court or something. No regular income etc. (i.e. they don't get to simply sit in a cell and collect an income from the state).
Not in every single case, but if it could be codified in a reasonable way, it would certainly make railroading a lot less interesting for the prosecution. I mean - it's one thing to lose a case, but losing a case AND having to spend time in jail? Very unlikely that prosecutors will be willing to risk that simply because of political pressure.
The first thing Sonna said after how happy he is to be free, is that he's going to keep doing the same sorts of things that got him in trouble. And he's also suing the government. It doesn't sound to me like the prosecutors were particularly brilliant in their making an example of him.
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.
Your logic is weak. They don't care about him or what he'll do. Look what every single article about this says: the guys life was destroyed. That was the message, "You mess with us and we'll destroy your life, enjoy picking up the pieces."
That is the message they sent to all the other people who may have considered talking out against the government. "Do so at your own peril, this is not a free society, step out of line and we'll bash your knees in."
Maybe he'll win some money or maybe he won't but the fear has been spread. Most people won't wish to spend 2+ years in hell (or worse, the government will learn from this) and losing everything they value (especially if they have kids).
it would certainly make railroading a lot less interesting for the prosecution
I think you would find just the opposite. If the prosecutor faced jail time for losing a case, he or she would probably go to more extreme lengths to insure a conviction.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
No, they did not succeed according to plan. They wanted to scare him into pleading guilty and going to prison, and they failed. It's pretty clear that the prosecution never expected this case to go to trial, and once it did they had no idea what to do with it. Even though he lost two years and much of his life, the prosecution lost too. The message that people will hear from this story is not "act up and you'll get crushed by the legal system"; rather it's "what this guy did was perfectly legal and OK."
Poking the cage is not illegal. Pissing off those in power should not land you in prison for 2 years. His behavior is not smart and the outcome might be predictable, but that does not make the outcome right.
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.
The man had his reputation and property taken from him by the state. Presumably, the prosecutor has both property and a reputation. In Babylon they solved this by summarily executing the prosecutor and conferring their lands and titles to the falsely accused. As a society, we've evolved, and I think we could make do with just transferring the property and reputation and leaving the accuser in the gutter.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Should the police be afraid of making mistakes?
First of all we're not just talking about the police, but the entire justice system. In cases like this the police probably just did what the prosecutors and judges told them to do.
That being said, "Should the justice system be afraid of making mistakes?" is the wrong question to ask.
"Should the justice system be less afraid of making mistakes than civilians?" is a lot easier to answer since the justice system itself is not exempt from the law.
If those responsible within the justice system make deliberate or negligent mistakes, they should be held accountable.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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.
And if a woman goes out at night after 9pm in a sexy outfit, not even carrying a firearm, well she is practically asking to be raped and tortured. She wouldn't be a victim. She would be doing it to herself. People can be so self-destructive. If you give a cop the finger and he beats you to death or shoots you until has Glock is out of bullets it is something you have done to yourself. The angry cop cannot be held responsible. And if you publicly criticize the government...well you know what to expect. The government cannot be held responsible for what they are forced to do to you. They would rather not ruin the life of an innocent person, but they were left with no choice. Victims have no one to blame but themselves. I think I am starting to understand now.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Arresting someone who is innocent or is later found not guilty - no.
The problem is that in our system simply being arrested results in a huge grind that is effectively punishment regardless of the final outcome. People spend months to years in jail. Their reputations are tarnished immediately and regardless of outcome, in a society where that reputation follows you even internationally (you can't just move to the next town over and start a new life - arrests show up on background checks). People don't own their means of production like farmers of yore did - if you lose your job you have no income, and it is difficult to get a new job. A speedy trial doesn't mean next week either.
The whole system is in massive need of reform.