Dirtbags!
“How can you defend those dirtbags!?”
It was my friend Clayton, a retired prison guard who had worked at the Kamloops Regional Corrections Centre. We were sitting together at the ’10am Small Dog Dog Park’ in West Kelowna and Clayton knew I had been a guard at Oakalla prison in Burnaby and a defence lawyer. For him it was more a statement than a question and it was perhaps the two hundredth time I’d been challenged about my work as a criminal defence lawyer.
Tony the Cop
The doors of the Club Zanzibar, one of Vancouver’s most notorious nightclubs, swung open. And in we went an Inspector, a dog handler and his police dog Argus, two other police officers and me, Cst. Tony Peyton, a green untested young cop seconded to the Vancouver Police Department through the UBC law student police officer program.
Dead Man Walking 1
The prosecutor leaned over to me as the witness left the courtroom, surrounded by a phalanx of police detectives, each of them with their hands on weapons under their jackets, “Dead man walking.” he whispered as the witness passed. I was a defence lawyer in one of the most dangerous and intense trials of my entire career. My client, Roch ‘Rock’ Pelletier, a French Canadian was charged with first degree murder and attempted murder.