The Crown has filed notice to appeal the June 19 acquittal of former Anglican priest Robin Barrett on child porn charges.
Barrett, 58, was found not guilty by Newfoundland and Labrador Supreme Court Justice Vikas Khladkar last month after he ruled the majority of the evidence against Barrett was inadmissible after police breached his rights.
The court had heard that investigators executed a search warrant on Barrett's Anchorage Road home in Conception Bay South in July 2015 but, before the search began and after Barrett had indicated he wanted to speak to a lawyer, one of the officers asked Barrett a question about the alleged offences. The judge ruled that breached Barrett’s rights.
As a result, none of the evidence seized after that point was admissible in court, and Barrett was acquitted of charges of distributing, accessing and possessing child pornography.
Crown prosecutor Sheldon Steeves said Friday the grounds for appeal filed with the Court of Appeal Newfoundland and Labrador is that the judge was wrong to exclude the evidence obtained during the search.
“Grounds are that the trial judge erred in excluding the evidence of the searches,” Steeves said. “We will wait for the Supreme Court Trial division to prepare the transcripts before we file our written arguments at some time in the future.”
In particular, the notice of appeal documents set out grounds that the trial judge erred in law by excluding evidence under Section 24(2) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms before giving the parties an opportunity to make submissions on the admissibility of the evidence.
The notice of appeal also states that the trial judge erred by failing to consider whether all the evidence, including the fruits of the search, should be excluded, as opposed to just the utterances made by the respondent, in determining whether the administration of justice could be brought into disrepute under the charter.
The case wasn’t the first time Barrett was charged with child pornography offences.
In 2010, he pleaded guilty to possessing and distributing child pornography after police found 31,460 images and 3,451 videos on his computer data, some depicting children as young as six months old.
He was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in jail and named to the national sex offender registry for 20 years.
