Sask Appeal Court rejects bid to overturn findings of Stonechild freezing inquiry

But the Saskatoon City Police Association and the former officers at the centre of the case say they will not give up their fight.

Former Saskatoon constables Larry Hartwig and Brad Senger, along with the association, had ask the province's highest court to quash the conclusions reached by Queen's Bench Justice David Wright at an inquiry into Neil Stonechild's death.

Stonechild, 17, was found frozen in a field on the outskirts of Saskatoon in November 1990. No one was ever charged in his death, but his family believes he was taken there by police and left for dead.

In his report released in 2004, Wright found that Stonechild had been in the custody of Hartwig and Senger on the last night he was seen alive and that his body bore marks that were probably caused by handcuffs.

Police association president Stan Goertzen said the organization will now ask the Supreme Court to review the inquiry's findings. There is no guarantee the high court will agree to do so, however.

"Last time I checked we still have the presumption of innocence in this country and this wouldn't stand if it was anyone besides police officers," Goertzen said in a telephone interview from Saskatoon.

"In some ways this has a national interest to it because there are so many different inquires out there involving police."

Lawyers for both Hartwig and Senger, who were fired after the inquiry and are currently appealing their dismissals, said they, too, will ask the Supreme Court to hear the case.

"My client maintains that he did absolutely nothing wrong. He did not have Neil Stonechild in his custody," said Senger's lawyer Jay Watson. "We'll continue to fight that battle and have him exonerated."

The lawyers had argued before the Saskatchewan court that Wright's findings were outside the inquiry's terms of reference and unconstitutional because they amounted to findings of civil or criminal liability.

But in a unanimous decision released Thursday, the Appeal Court ruled that Wright was entitled to make findings of fact and that is exactly what he did.

"Findings of fact, of course, will frequently indicate that specific individuals are at fault in some way," Justice Bob Richards wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel.

"However, this in itself is not sufficient to warrant circumscribing the work of inquiries. The efforts of most commissions would be largely pointless if they could not involve findings about what went wrong and why."

The former officers also argued that Wright improperly assessed the evidence of some witnesses, including key witness Jason Roy who testified he last saw Stonechild, bleeding and screaming for his life, in the back of a police car. They suggested Wright chose to believe Roy, despite evidence that contradicted his story.

But the Appeal Court refused to act.

"It is simply not appropriate for this court, in the context of a judicial review application, to be drawn into a fundamental reassessment of the evidence," Richards wrote.

"That is particularly so when the commissioner's findings of fact are so deeply connected to his assessment of the credibility of the key witnesses who appeared before him."