Judges in Peel Region have let at least eight alleged gun offenders walk free after finding police made illegal searches and, in some cases, misled the court to cover up the misconduct.

A “disturbing pattern,” Justice Bruce Durno recently called it before tossing the case against Jahmarr Sterling-Debney, who was found with a .22-calibre pistol and faced a minimum of three years in prison if convicted.

The judge said Peel officers Stephen Porciello and Michael Bishop broke the law by arbitrarily detaining, searching and arresting the suspect on Derry Road in Mississauga, and then attempted to mislead the court about how they seized the man’s gun.

“The public has an interest in having these serious charges prosecuted to a verdict,” Justice Durno said but added the officer’s behaviour was the more serious threat to the reputation of the justice system. “It is essential that the court (dissociate) itself from the police misconduct at the roadside and in court.”

Durno’s ruling is yet another message from Ontario courts that police misconduct undermines public trust in the justice system and must be condemned.

A 2012 Star investigation revealed more than 100 cases of police dishonesty in courts across the country.

The series on thestar.com:Police who lie

How officers thwart justice with false testimony

Crown must now report police who lie

The articles, which also found Ontario had no formal method of reporting such incidents, prompted the attorney general to make a new policy requiring prosecutors in the province to do just that.

In Peel Region, though, the problem continues.

The Star found five recent cases where judges said Peel officers illegally searched suspects’ cars and uncovered guns. Eight accused gun offenders were acquitted as a result.

In these instances, officers followed hunches and found reliable evidence of crimes. Whether out of laziness, overzealousness or poor training, they violated laws put in place to protect citizens from abuse of police power.

In two of the cases, officers gave misleading evidence in court after the Attorney General’s new policy came into effect in January.

All of the officers named in this story either refused to comment or did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Peel Police is looking into the issue after being notified by the Crown attorney’s office of recent court decisions denouncing officers’ actions and testimonies, a police spokeswoman said.

“All of the cases you have identified have either been, or will be reviewed and the appropriate action taken.”

Following the misconduct of veteran Peel officer Sgt. Stephen Ceballo, a loaded handgun was excluded as evidence in two cases and the suspects walked. When reached at his home, Ceballo refused to comment.

In March 2013, Justice Casey Hill found Ceballo misled the court about the shoddy arrest of suspect Adrian Thompson, a repeat gun offender found with a loaded pistol, marijuana and cocaine in his vehicle.

After receiving a call about a man suspected to have a gun, Ceballo and three other officers approached Thompson in the parking lot of a Brick furniture store. They did not tell Thompson the reason he was being detained nor of his right to contact a lawyer. After they searched the SUV and found drugs and the gun and placed Thompson in cuffs, they did not immediately tell him the reason for his arrest.

In court, Ceballo was argumentative, “shifted dramatically” when describing his reason for searching the car, and frequently paused and struggled for answers.

“The sergeant’s evidence was transparently and deliberately misleading as he sought to dodge the inevitable press of questioning establishing his absence of grounds and unlawful authority,” Justice Hill said.

After the judge’s findings, Thompson, who had two prior gun convictions, walked free.

“The disturbing aspect of these warrantless search cases is that they represent only a small fraction of the number of unlawful searches which evidently occur on a regular basis in Peel,” said Thompson’s lawyer Peter Bawden in an interview. “The intent of the court with these decisions is to enforce the rights of everyone in Peel to be free from unreasonable police searches.”

At his home in Brampton, Thompson, 28, who now works part-time as a forklift operator, said he carried the Glock 17 handgun because “I have enemies” and because “I had drugs” to protect.

“Everything in the car was mine. The gun, the drugs. I admitted I put it there. There was no warrant. Peel cops, they don’t like to follow protocol.”

The president of the Peel Regional Police Association said the cases should be viewed in the context of all gun offences before Peel’s courts since 2010.

“There are five cases being talked about — how about all of the other ones where everything was fine? Is this a disturbing pattern or are these just one-offs?” said Wayne Omardeen.

While police officers can randomly stop vehicles to check vehicle safety or a driver’s paperwork, they must otherwise have reasonable grounds to believe an offence is being committed to stop a car, detain a person or search a house. Mere suspicion of criminality is not enough.

A year before Thompson’s case was tossed, in April 2012, another judge in another gun case found Ceballo ordered the unlawful search of a suspect’s car.

After stopping the vehicle for running a red light, police discovered neither the driver nor passenger had a valid licence. Ceballo, in what he called a “teaching moment,” directed the younger constables that the car be seized, towed and searched.

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But police had no basis to seize or search the car, Justice David Corbett ruled.

“The supervising officer engaged in an investigative technique that should not be taught to junior officers,” the judge said, adding that excluding the gun as evidence was “the best way to discourage this sort of illegal search.”

The suspects were acquitted.

(Ceballo’s investigative techniques also came under fire in a 2012 drug case. After the officer seized a package containing heroin, a judge ruled police did not have legal grounds to detain the driver or search his trunk. The judge said Ceballo “seemed as if he tailored his evidence to fit the facts.” The heroin was excluded as evidence.)

Other cases found by the Star include:

Four men were acquitted of weapons charges in September 2010 after Justice John Sproat ruled their arrest and vehicle search was “unlawful,” and the weapons seized, including a loaded rifle, were excluded. The judge also criticized an officer’s evidence about an informant who tipped police off about the car, calling it “highly misleading.”

In a December 2012 decision to allow as evidence a loaded gun Peel officers found hidden in a car, Justice Durno said the evidence “demonstrated an apparent common, but incorrect, (belief) amongst Peel Region Police that an arrest provided grounds to search a vehicle without a warrant, which showed a disturbing ignorance of the law.”

In the case of Sterling-Debney, found with a loaded .22-calibre handgun in his car, Justice Bruce Durno found the officers “were going to stop and search the vehicle in any event based on nothing more than speculation or a hunch.”

The accused testified that just before midnight on June 23, 2012, he left his girlfriend’s apartment, walked through the apartment building’s parking lot and opened the trunk to look for his girlfriend’s son’s baseball hat.

Then, while using his cellphone to call a friend, Sterling-Debney turned on to Rexwood Road and drove toward Derry Road, where he was pulled over by the two officers. They searched the car and found a loaded gun in the trunk.

Why the officers followed the Honda and how they made the arrest was disputed at trial was.

The officers testified that they stopped the car not because the driver was talking on a cellphone but because moments earlier they saw him put what they believed was a handgun in the trunk. They said their experience guided them to take the suspect and his weapon off the street.

Durno found a number of major problems with the two officers’ testimony.

Like when, during the preliminary inquiry stage of the case, Porciello testified that the suspect sat in the Honda for two-and-a-half minutes before pulling out of the lot. If the officers strongly believed he had a gun, this would have been the time to approach and make the arrest, the judge said.

“That that option was never discussed, if they honestly believed he had put a gun in the trunk, is incredible. It makes absolutely no sense to let the driver drive away in the car and potentially away from them or to choose an option that may have resulted in a high-speed pursuit.”

At trial, the officer tried to change his testimony about how long the Honda was in the lot before departing.

The judge also noted Porciello was “combative . . . , argumentative, defensive, evasive and unresponsive . . . belligerent and defiant . . . (and) appeared nervous and fidgety.

“It was not the adrenalin flowing that caused the nervousness. It was apprehension about his evidence, knowing some of the things he had committed to at the preliminary inquiry. When confronted with some of those comments, he tried to distance himself from them, not elaborate on them. . . . He was not a credible witness.”

Durno also noted the officer sometimes paused while struggling to come up with answers that would “assist his position.”

“That type of mental scrambling had the effect of attempting to mislead the court . . . . His manner of testifying and attitude . . . were most troubling.”

Sterling-Debney’s lawyer, Jeff Hershberg, told the Star that the ruling shows a police force’s pattern of conduct in such cases will factor into judges’ rulings on future similar cases. “The public needs to know that one Peel judge after another is worried the Peel police have no respect for the Charter and the truth.”