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Under the chief’s direction, the service appealed the commission’s ruling through a judicial review, which was heard at the end of January. Bordeleau said his position on sentencing remains the same.

“I am seeking dismissal,” he said.

The police commission initially ruled that the service breached its own established procedure on performance evaluation, that the hearing officer didn’t address Diafwila’s evidence or the evidence of his three witnesses in his final decision and that the hearing officer ignored important evidence.

In a 2-1 decision released in early March of this year, a panel of three judges ruled that the commission was over-enforcing a regulation that set out what needed to be done by the police force before an officer could be fired for their on-the-job performance.

“The Commission’s reversal of the hearing officer was the product of its unreasonable construction of the regulation, which resulted in its failure to give due deference to the hearing officer’s findings of fact,” the ruling says.

“The Commission’s decision was intelligible and transparent but it was not justifiable. It imposed a number of confusing and impossibly demanding preconditions that the law simply did not require. The result was perverse.”

The ruling also found that the hearing officer didn’t ignore the evidence, he simply didn’t mention portions of it in his decision because it wasn’t relevant to whether Diafwila could independently properly perform his job.