A former city employee who stole cocaine out of a drug locker at the Burnaby RCMP detachment has lost his sentence appeal.
A judge dismissed an appeal by Gary Kenneth Read to have his 14-month sentence for the crime reduced to a conditional sentence.
Read, a longtime special constable once in charge of exhibits in Burnaby, was charged with theft in November 2011 after an exhibit audit at the local RCMP detachment in the spring of that year revealed some drugs were unaccounted for.
Read was found guilty in February 2015.
He appealed his sentence, alleging a variety of errors on the part of the trial judge, including failing to consider exceptional and/or mitigating factors, placing too much weight on denunciation and deterrence, and an error when he considered the appellant’s lack of co-operation and choice to remain silent as an aggravating factor.
However, the court disagreed and dismissed the appeal.
“Even assuming error in principle, the appellant failed to demonstrate that the error resulted in an unfit sentence,” wrote Justice Gregory Fitch in the decision. “Offences of the kind committed by the appellant implicate public confidence in the administration of justice. A conditional sentence of imprisonment would, in the circumstances of this case, be inconsistent with the predominant sentencing principles of general deterrence and denunciation.”
According to court documents, sometime in March 2011, Read stole almost a kilogram of cocaine from an exhibit box stored in the secure drug locker. The cocaine, which had been marked for destruction, had a street value ranging from $22,000 to $44,000, depending on how it was packaged.
The theft was discovered in the course of an audit. Read aroused suspicions when he re-taped boxes containing cocaine before the auditors had finished their examination of those boxes.
Read, who was 59 when he was sentenced, initially denied responsibility for the crime. But after taking and failing a lie-detector test, he confessed. He told the police that, in an “isolated act of inexplicably poor judgment,” he had taken the cocaine home and flushed it down the sink.
Read denied ever having done anything like this in the past and told investigators he could not explain why he committed the offence.
