Traffic prosecutor taking ticket-fixing convictions to Supreme Court of Canada
Court of Appeal upholds convictions and three-month sentence handed out to former York Region paralegal prosecutor Caterina Petrolo
A paralegal found guilty of fixing traffic tickets for friends of her police officer boyfriend is taking her conviction appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada after her latest setback in court.
Last spring, Caterina Petrolo received a three-month conditional sentence when she was convicted of one count of breach of trust of a public official and one count of attempt to obstructing justice, after using her position as a York Region prosecutor to improperly influence the outcome of provincial offences matters.
In a recent judgment by the Court of Appeal for Ontario, the three-judge panel dismissed Petrolo’s appeal of both the conviction and sentence.
“We are disappointed that our arguments were not successful at the Court of Appeal and we are applying to the Supreme Court if Canada for leave to appeal,” Petrolo’s lawyer Alan Gold said in a statement to Court Report Canada.
According to the ruling, Petrolo ran into trouble as a result of communications with her boyfriend, York Regional Police Constable Richard Senior, who was the target of a major police corruption probe.
Petrolo originally faced charges concerning five incidents of alleged improper intervention in the prosecution of traffic offences, between May and October 2018, but the trial judge acquitted her in three of the cases.
The convictions came for her interventions in cases involving two contacts of Senior’s – one whose charge was withdrawn, and another who pleaded guilty to a lesser offence.
According to the ruling, Petrolo did not appear as a prosecutor on either of the cases, and the only evidence linking her to them were her intercepted communications with Senior.
The messages were only entered as evidence at Petrolo’s trial after the paralegal failed in a Charter challenge to have them excluded.
In a group chat quoted by the Court of Appeal, Petrolo wrote that the father of one of Senior’s friends “owes me a drink” after charges were withdrawn concerning his ticket for disobeying a stop sign.
And in a recorded phone call, she told the police officer that she had “worked some magic” with a ticket issued to a friend of a friend of Senior’s, whose charge for careless driving was reduced to disobeying a lane light.
On appeal, the panel rejected Petrolo’s argument that her conviction was unreasonable because the trial judge could not rule out the possibility she had been lying to impress Senior:
“Here, the trial judge could reasonably take the appellant at her word and conclude in light of human experience and common sense that the appellant had in fact ‘fixed’ the tickets as a favor to Senior and his associates. There was nothing manifestly untrue about any of the appellant’s intercepted communications. The appellant did not testify, so there was no evidence that she was lying in these communications. There is no ‘common sense’ inference that a party to an affair will lie so as to ingratiate him or herself with the other party,” the decision reads. “There is no basis to conclude that the trial judge reversed the burden of proof or failed to consider the absence of evidence from the prosecutors who actually dealt with the matters in the courtroom.”
The Court of Appeal also upheld the trial judge’s conclusion that there was no Charter breach in the disclosure of the intercepted communications and backed his sentence as reasonable. While Petrolo sought a conditional discharge, the panel ruled that the three-month conditional sentence imposed “was not demonstrably unfit.”
“The weight to be given to the mitigation factor of remorse demonstrated by a guilty plea in the other cases was a matter for each of the sentencing judges in those cases. That mitigating factor was absent here. Whether a conditional discharge would have been contrary to the public interest was a discretionary decision available to the trial judge,” they wrote. “Given the serious violations of trust placed in the appellant as an official, and the potential to erode public confidence in the administration of justice, some denunciation was required. There is no basis to interfere with the trial judge’s decision that a conditional discharge would not be appropriate.”
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