TORONTO

It’s another black eye for Toronto Police delivered from the judicial bench.

Unfortunately it comes rather late for Nosakhare Ohenhen. Long after the admitted drug dealer finished serving five years in prison, Justice Michael Quigley has acquitted him of all charges at his retrial, slamming Toronto cops for racial profiling and suggesting they may have even planted the drugs found in the man’s Jaguar when he was stopped on Aug. 21, 2008.

Quigley said he had “very serious concerns about systemic police misconduct here”: Officers detained and searched Ohenhen and his vehicle without cause and his request to contact his lawyer “was totally and shockingly ignored by the police” for almost five hours.

As a result of those “very serious and egregious charter violations,” the judge threw out the evidence of the gun, cocaine and marijuana seized during his illegal arrest. “These are deeply troubling examples of police conduct dedicated to the ‘end justifies the means principle,’” Quigley said in his judgment. “Mr. Ohenhen paid serious consequences for that conduct, having been sentenced and only released in 2014. That calls for strong judicial sanction.”

Ohenhen, 28 at the time, parked his car near Parkdale Collegiate and was walking to retrieve the cellphone he forgot at his friend’s house when he was stopped by police on bicycle patrol. One officer told the court he stopped him for a seatbelt infraction, another said his music was too loud. They then suspected the bulge at his waist was a gun. It wasn’t.

“Mr. Ohenhen was detained without any legal basis to support it, and then, when he ran away ... as he was entitled to do given no legal or articulable cause for his detention, he was chased, tackled, searched at least three times, two at the scene and once at 14 Division, and his vehicle was searched with no warrant and no grounds to support a need to do so,” the judge said.

“The ‘icing on the cake’ was the total failure of police authorities to respect Mr. Ohenhen’s rights to be told why he was detained and arrested, which never happened at the scene, and only later at the police station, and the total and admitted failure to permit him to retain and instruct counsel without delay. There was plenty of delay here.”

Ohenhen was nailed with 17 charges, including possession of a loaded, restricted firearm found hidden in his car and possession of cocaine and of marijuana for the purposes of trafficking. Clearly, this was not a law-abiding dude. But the police didn’t have a legal right to go on a hunting expedition to find that out.

“The question was whether the rule of law applies, whether you have a right to drive freely in this city,” said Ohenhen’s lawyer, Luc Leclair. “I’m happy that that at the end of the day, the judge saw what was going on.”

Ohenhen was convicted in 2010 and sentenced to nine years in prison. The Court of Appeal, after a five-year delay, ordered a new trial in 2015 but by then, he’d already finished serving his sentence. But he wasn’t willing to walk away. Ohenhen always argued that he was pulled over that afternoon because he was a black man driving an expensive vehicle.

The judge agreed.

Quigley accused the five police officers of colluding “to get their stories straight” to justify the unlawful stop and search and answered an estimated 100 questions with the same “I don’t remember.”

The judge didn’t buy any of their testimony. “I have found it to be neither credible nor reliable, individually or in its totality.”

Quigley also wondered whether Ohenhen’s drugs were actually seized from a youth stopped by the same officers an hour earlier. “It ... raises at least a strong suspicion, if not compelling evidence, that Mr. Ohenhen’s claims that the police planted drugs on his person are true.”

That is quite a damning and troubling accusation.

“While the public is rightly concerned that communities need to be kept safe from firearms and drug trafficking,” Quigley concluded, “they are not people who are ever likely to believe that the end will justify the use of illegal and unconstitutional means.”

Not surprisingly, Ohenhen is considering a civil lawsuit.

mmandel@postmedia.com