Editor's note: The following article may contain language that is offensive to some readers.
Barrie police officers did nothing wrong when they searched a man during an arrest, pulling a bag of cocaine out of the front of his pants, the Ontario Court of Appeal has determined.
Ronald Byfield, 29, who was handed a two-year sentence for trafficking cocaine last year, argued that his rights were violated because he was subjected to an illegal strip search when the 184-gram bag was discovered.
In making his plea to the appeal court, Byfield represented himself, receiving some help from duty counsel.
He first made the argument before a motion judge in Barrie and failed, leading to his conviction in June 2019.
The Ontario Court of Appeal has upheld the lower court's decision.
“The evidence demonstrates that the searching officer’s safety concerns were real and that it was appropriate to conduct a second pat-down search,” Justice Lois B. Roberts wrote on behalf of the three-member panel.
“Given his discovery of the unknown object in the appellant’s groin area, further investigation was reasonable and necessary," Roberts added. "We disagree with the appellant’s submission that, because the police station was only four minutes away, the strip search could have waited until then. The strip search was necessary to ensure the safety of all concerned (as described above) during this journey to the police station, even if that journey was to be brief.”
Acting on a tip, Barrie police officers were conducting surveillance of a Napier Street house, watching for a drug exchange, in January 2017.
According to the decision, the officers followed two men who left the house in a van, which was driven to the nearby Duckworth Plaza.
There they met up with someone else who had arrived in another car. That driver then hopped into the back of the first vehicle briefly, where police believed a drug transaction was taking place.
Police pulled over the van as it was leaving the parking lot.
An initial pat-down search of the suspect revealed nothing. But another search, conducted for safety reasons before the man was transported to the station, revealed “a large hard object in the appellant’s groin region,” believed to be non-anatomical.
When asked what it was, Byfield replied: “My dick.”
“He and another officer rearranged the appellant’s clothing and reached into his underwear where they located a package containing 184 grams of cocaine,” wrote Roberts. “... The motion judge found that the officers had reasonable grounds to believe that the appellant had committed a drug-trafficking offence and could be arrested without a warrant.”
Byfield argued that police acted on stale information from an unproven source and that it was outdated. But the motion judge found that the evidence police relied upon formed reasonable grounds and that the arrest was lawful.
The appeal court panel agreed that the search was conducted in a reasonable manner, met the safety standards and protocols “and there was no evidence to suggest that the search was gratuitously aggressive or humiliating."
