End of summer house and garden party with Blue Rodeo’s Bob Egan:

Monday, August 29, 2005 from 5:00 p.m. on.

E-mail or call me at the coordinates below for more details.

Frustrated by months of stonewalling, the family of Robert Bagnell have filed a Petition in the Supreme Court of British Columbia (Action No. L051909) seeking a court order to compel provincial authorities to turn over autopsy reports and to hold a coroner’s inquest into Robert’s death.

Robert Bagnell, 44, died suddenly on June 23, 2004 on the fifth floor of a Vancouver rooming house. Vancouver police originally told his family he died of a drug overdose. About a month later, the police told the media that they had repeatedly used a Taser on him before he succumbed. Later, the police suggested that they had used the Taser in order to “rescue” Robert from a fire on the first floor.

Although a coroner’s inquest is mandatory whenever someone dies in police custody, the BC Coroner’s Service has so far refused to schedule an inquest or to provide autopsy results to the family.

Robert Bagnell’s parents have had to rely on media reports to try to understand how and why their son died. The autopsy and toxicology reports, which would include the cause of death, have been kept secret from them. However, many others have seen the documents. Here’s a partial list of those who presumably have copies of the documents that have been kept from the family: the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy, the coroner, VPD investigators, Victoria PD investigators, Police Complaint Commissioner Dirk Ryneveld, Q.C., several Crown Counsel lawyers… everyone with an interest in the case, except Robert Bagnell’s parents and sister.

The family plans to have their Petition heard in BC Supreme Court on August 29, 2005.

The British Columbia Court of Appeal has dismissed the appeal of six graduates of the University of British Columbia’s MBA program, finding that UBC had the right to ‘adjust’ their tuition fees to $28,000 each from the fees of $7,000 that they had previously contracted to pay.

Chief Justice Finch, for the Court, stated that “although I have sympathy for the appellants in this case, they have not established a reversible error on the part of the trial judge.” He found that the statement in the tuition fee agreement that “fees for the year are subject to adjustment and the University reserves the right to change fees without notice” enabled UBC to quadruple tuition after the contract had been made. He also concluded that the quadrupling was not unconscionable.

This has proven to be a harsh introduction to the world of business for these business school students, particularly since UBC seems intent on pusuing them for court costs.

Read the decision.

The Do RAV Right Coalition will be in BC Supreme Court starting Monday June 20 at 10 a.m. in its legal efforts to force the province to undertake a new public consultation process on the Richmond-Airport-Vancouver rapid transit line because of RAV’s switch to environmentally damaging cut-and-cover construction.

Coalition lawyer Joyce Thayer says she will argue that the province must follow existing provincial and federal laws that guarantee the right of citizens to comprehensive and meaningful public consultation on the environmental impact of switching to cut-and-cover construction from its original plans to proceed by underground bored tunnel.

Other parties to the case include RAVCO, the organization building the line, TransLink and the federal government. BC Supreme Court Justice Robert Bauman has set aside four days to hear legal arguments.

The case was begun after RAVCO announced in late December 2004 that it would switch construction from a bored tunnel to “cut-and-cover” construction which would require digging a 40-foot deep trench along Granville Mall and up the full length of Cambie Street.

This radical design change and switch to cut-and-cover construction will be devastating, the Coalition says. It will create traffic gridlock for 2-3 years, jeopardize livelihoods, and seriously disrupt the lives of residents in the affected areas.

Since May 28, 2005, eight people have died in police custody after being jolted by Tasers. This brings the total number of such deaths since September, 1999 to 128, including 33 so far this year. In our view, no one fully understands the effects of 50,000 volts of electricity on the human body, and use of these weapons should be discontinued until better testing and research is done.

The most recent deaths:

May 28, 2005: Richard T. Holcomb, 18, Akron, Ohio

May 28, 2005: Nazario J. Solorio, 38, Escondido, California

June 4, 2005: Unidentified male, 33, Sacramento, California

June 7, 2005: Unidentified male, Las Vegas, Nevada

June 11, 2005: Horace Owens, 48, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

June 13, 2005: Michael Anthony Edwards, 32, Palatka, Florida

June 13, 2005: Shawn Pirozzi, 30, Canton, Ohio

June 14, 2005: Robert Earl Williams, 62, Waco, Texas