Kurt Churchill, accused in 2020 slaying, no longer facing charges due to court delays

A man accused in a 2020 homicide in St. John's is no longer being prosecutedThursday after he was granted a stay of proceedings due to court delays.

Kurt Churchill had been accused in the death of James Cody, who was found dead of a gunshot wound on Craigmillar Avenue in the city's west end in the early morning of July 5,2020.

Justice Vikas Khaladkar handed down the decision to Supreme Court in St. John's on Thursday morning.

The stay was granted under court guidelines intended to ensure the Charter right of an accused to be tried in a reasonable time. For cases in Supreme Court, the guideline is 30 months.

Churchill was arrested in June 2021, with the 30 months expiring in December 2023.

Khaladkar said Thursday the Crown failed to provide redacted information to Churchill's defence team and, in doing so, one of his lawyers heard a recording by mistake. The Crown then asked to have all three of Churchill's lawyers dismissed just weeks before his trial was due to begin last fall.

Those disclosure issues, which were the root cause of the delay, were not the fault of the defence,Khaladkar ruled.

Churchill was not present in court to hearKhaladkar's decision. He is in custody in Ontario on other criminal charges, including sexual assault, uttering threats, assaulting a peace officer and breaches of his release order.

Carolyn Pitcher, Cody's sister, was present, however, and made her displeasure withKhaladkar's ruling known inside the mostly empty courtroom. "Money talks, murderers walk," she said loudly, just afterKhaladkar stayed the proceedings.

Pitcher expressed intense frustration with a legal system that permitted Churchill to walk free without a trial.

"That's the way the world runs," she said. "I'm sick of it. This got to stop."

Court delays

Before Khaladkar's decision Thursday, proceedings in the Churchillcase had alreadybeen marked by other delays. In December 2021, Supreme Court Justice Robert P. Stack ruled police had given misleading evidence and taken too long to conclude their investigation.

Three days after Cody's death, police investigators found a handgun on a property behind 40 Craigmillar Ave., a home owned by Churchill. Officers also seized several items inside the home, including $434,000 in cash, a money counter, vacuum bags and a vacuum sealer. The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary handled the murder investigation, as Cody was killed in its jurisdiction. The RCMP launched a separate investigation into drug trafficking and money laundering.)

Police are allowed to hold evidence for up to three months but must get court permission if the investigation takes longer, and must demonstrate an investigation is sufficiently complex to retain evidence for more than a year.

In Churchill's case, police said the investigation was taking longer because of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and delays in getting financial records. But Stack said neither explanation, in an affidavit from Cpl. Laura Purchase, was enough to justify holding onto the evidence until April 2022, as requested by prosecutors.

Stack said Purchase didn't provide details to show how the pandemic had affected the investigation, and found all financial institutions contacted during the investigation had responded in a normal time frame.

"This conflicting evidence sworn by Cpl. Purchase is concerning," Stack said at the time."She would have me believe that delays in the investigation have been caused by COVID-19. The evidence proves otherwise. Either she deliberately misled the court as to the responses of these entities to production orders or, at best, she was less than forthright in her account."

The judge ruled the police would not be able to retain the evidence.

Delays in previous cases

In 2014, Churchill was arrested under a drug investigation called Operation Battalion in 2014 and was acquitted when his lawyer successfully argued his trial which was scheduled for January 2018, more than three years after his arrest had been unfairly delayed.

The homicide victim, Cody, had also had drug charges thrown out for lengthy court delays.

Cody was arrested in a massive interprovincial drug probe, known as Operation Razorback, in 2010, but his case was thrown out in 2017 by the Supreme Court of Canada because he hadhad to wait five years for a five-daytrial.

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