Gurpreet Dhillon is hoping to use that information to help him challenge his life sentence for similar crimes in the U.S.
A B.C. man is facing a court battle as he attempts to force prosecutors here to release the reasons why they decided not to go ahead with sex-crime charges against him in 2008.
Gurpreet (Garry) Dhillon is hoping to use that information to help him challenge his life sentence for similar crimes in the U.S.
Dhillon has made several attempts under B.C.’s freedom-of-information laws to obtain the records, going as far as the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner.
Earlier this month, the B.C. attorney general went to court to block the release of the information, citing the importance of the independence of prosecutors to make decisions about a case.
Dhillon was charged in B.C. in 2007 with an unknown number of sexually based offences but all charges were stayed in 2008, records from the information and privacy commissioner show.
In 2008, Dhillon was also charged in the U.S. with similar offences involving the same victim. He was arrested in 2015 in Canada and extradited to the U.S. three years later. In 2019, he was sentenced to four life sentences in a U.S. prison, according to the records. Attempts to determine where in the U.S. the crimes were committed were unsuccessful.
In 2023, Dhillon’s lawyer filed a court petition in the U.S. challenging his convictions. Dhillon believes the information from his Canadian case will help him overturn those U.S. convictions, the records state.
Dhillon’s attempts to obtain a 2008 prosecution memo to Surrey RCMP explaining why it was entering a stay of proceedings go back to 2015. But the Ministry of Attorney General, which oversees the B.C. Prosecution Service, repeatedly refused his requests, arguing, among other things, that it would lead to the release of information related to the exercise of prosecutorial discretion.
Dhillon asked the information and privacy commissioner in 2022 for a review of his denied requests and was told it was too late, but that he could file a new request, which he did.
But the attorney general refused him again, and also asked the privacy commissioner to dismiss his latest request as an abuse of process that was “tying up” the system.
“As a Canadian citizen, I have the right under the privacy act to be able to access my records that are held within a government entity,” Dhillon wrote to the privacy commissioner in June 2023.
In a decision released in October, an adjudicator at the office of the commissioner concluded Dhillon’s actions did not constitute an abuse of process and that the matter should proceed to an inquiry.
In a separate decision that month, another office adjudicator concluded that it was “necessary” for that office to review the withheld memo in order to make an “informed and independent” decision whether it should be withheld from disclosure.
Earlier this month, lawyers for the attorney general filed a petition in B.C. Supreme Court seeking a judicial review of that decision.
The petition asks the court to quash the decision, make a declaration that the ministry is “not required to produce information subject to prosecutorial discretion privilege” or send the matter back to the commissioner for reconsideration.
In the petition, it is revealed that the withheld memo in question is 14 pages long, and consists solely of “a charge assessment memorandum” between the prosecution service and the Surrey RCMP.
“This memorandum provides the rationale underlying a … decision to approve or not approve a prosecution, and thus the charge-assessment memorandum is distinctively characteristic of prosecutorial discretion: no other record more plainly and obviously embodies the exercise of prosecutorial discretion,” the petition says. “The disclosure of the charge-assessment memorandum could infringe the independence of Crown counsel (prosecutors) in exercising their prosecutorial discretion.”
A date has not been set for a judge to hear the petition.