One Edmonton youth in conflict with the law: A case study.

• Author: Jansen, Stephanie
• Position: Case study

We have all been there at one point in time: young, insecure, and impressionable. You would do anything to fit in: wear the right clothes; listen to the proper music; dislike the right people and share the same opinions as all the cool kids. But what if the cool kids were the RCMP acting as undercover agents to obtain a confession from a teenager suspected of killing two people?

This is precisely what happened in the spring of 2012 during a "Mr. Big" operation where undercover officers coerced a murder confession from a youth under the guise of recruiting him for organized crime activities. Barry Boenke and Susan Trudel were found bludgeoned and shot on their property in Strathcona County in 2009. Two youths were arrested after they were discovered driving the stolen truck belonging to Mr. Boenke. The charges were stayed in 2011 after a judge excluded an illegally obtained confession from one of the young men.

Despite this exclusion, the RCMP carried on with its attempts to lure the teen into their imaginary gang. The strategy included supplying the underage foster child with beer, concert and hockey tickets, a PlayStation and a trip to the mountains.

Through the interception of letters, and the monitoring of the teen's phone calls, the RCMP spent over 200,000 dollars on the undercover operation. Eventually, they received what they set out to accomplish: the teen confessed to killing Boenke and Trudel. Regardless of the fact that the confession contained many factual errors and outright absurdities, the RCMP arrested the teen for the two murders.

There are some obvious issues with this approach, the most blatant being that the conduct by the RCMP could be interpreted as abusive. The teen was a foster child with a poverty stricken upbringing, and a history of sexual abuse. Some might argue that it was no wonder the boy was so keen to have his "new friends" accept him into their gang. A lifetime of neglect and exclusion had resulted in a very attention-deprived young man, willing to sacrifice practically anything to be recognized.

These circumstances have raised some moral and ethical questions around whether these types of operations ought to be used when the target suspect is a youth. The teen's defence lawyer argued that the case was an example of police entrapment. This was argued after the teen was found guilty of counseling to commit murder in March 2013. But by May of the same year, Justice Brian Burrows threw out the confessions the...