A Crown prosecutor has asked a judge to impose an unprecedented 18-year jail sentence on a North Vancouver fentanyl dealer to underscore the deadly impacts of the drug on the community.
Prosecutor Oren Bick asked Judge Bonnie Craig of Richmond Provincial Court to consider handing Walter James McCormick, 52, a longer jail sentence than usual for other types of drug dealing, precisely because the drug is so dangerous.
“It is a very powerful drug. It is a very dangerous drug. People are dying more and more from overdosing on it,” Bick told the judge in court Tuesday morning.
Bick argued a new standard needs to be set for sentencing of fentanyl dealers because while the drug results in the same type of high and addictiveness as heroin, it has a much higher potency, is more difficult for dealers to cut in a safe manner and is more likely than heroin to kill.
A fentanyl dealer should therefore get a longer sentence than a dealer who traffics a drug like cocaine, Bick argued.
McCormick is being sentenced after pleading guilty Aug. 29 to five charges including one charge of trafficking fentanyl in North Vancouver and four charges of possessing drugs, including fentanyl, for the purpose of trafficking in North Vancouver, Langley and Richmond.
McCormick was arrested Feb. 17, 2015 in one of the Lower Mainland’s first major fentanyl trafficking busts that followed a lengthy undercover police investigation under the name “Project Tainted.”
According to circumstances of the case described in court, when police raided McCormick’s North Vancouver home at 2681 Poplynn Dr., along with his car and storage locker, they turned up 30,000 fentanyl pills with a street value of $945,000 – along with cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana and Alprazolam (benzodiazepine) pills worth about another $1 million.
Bick is asking the judge for a 10-year sentence for McCormick’s role as a high-level supplier in dealing fentanyl and other drugs from a North Vancouver base in early 2015, and a further eight years for his role in dealing drugs, including fentanyl, in Richmond, while out on bail in May 2016.
Bick said previously outside court he’s asking the judge to stake out new ground with her sentencing decision.
But McCormick’s defence lawyer Lawrence Myers rejected what he called a “horrific sentence.”
Making an example of McCormick won’t solve B.C.’s fentanyl death crisis, said Myers.
“This notion that this problem is somehow going to evaporate because of a sentence is illusory,” he told the judge.
Myers said 40 years ago authorities advocated stiff sentences for marijuana and heroin dealers but, “We know now it does not work.”
Myers said examples such as the U.S. prove “lengthy periods of incarceration do not deter people.”
Myers urged the judge to base her sentence on “what is law and what is real in our community” and impose a jail sentence of between eight and nine years for all of the offences.
According to details of the case described by the Crown prosecutor in court, McCormick supplied fentanyl pills to a dealer who then sold them to an undercover police officer posing as a mid-level dealer from Yellowknife. Two exchanges, observed by police surveillance officers, happened at a gas station parking lot on Mountain Highway in Lynn Valley.
When police raided McCormick’s home on Poplynn Drive and a storage locker on Main Street, they turned up huge quantities of fentanyl and other drugs, along with cash, a digital scale, pill press, fillers for pill making and a money counter.
After he was arrested and charged, McCormick was released on $100,000 bail. He was rearrested and charged with more drug offences at the end of June 2016 after staff at the Sandman Inn in Richmond called police in May to report trouble evicting him from his hotel room. Police seized 18 kg of vacuum-packed marijuana, 2 kg of cocaine, 1,000 fentanyl pills, more than 4,000 Alprazolam pills and a money counter from his car and hotel room. McCormick has been in custody since June 27.
McCormick’s past criminal record includes a 10-year jail sentence handed down in 2000 for trafficking in multiple kilograms of cocaine in the United States, a six-year sentence he received in 2002 after pleading guilty to trafficking cocaine in Surrey and a 20-month sentence handed down in 2012 for trafficking 3 kg of hashish in North Vancouver.
Bick told the judge McCormick was a mid-level dealer with “a wide customer base” who has not been deterred by previous jail sentences.
Provincial court Judge Bonnie Craig has reserved her sentencing decision until the new year.
Charges against McCormick’s former spouse Karen Marie Armistead, a registered nurse, were withdrawn by the prosecutor on the same day McCormick pleaded guilty.
B.C.’s director of civil forfeiture has filed a claim against the Poplynn Drive home, registered in Armistead’s name, as well as a condo in Oliver and 3.4-acre waterfront property on Gambier Island, saying those properties were all connected with, or bought with the proceeds of, McCormick’s drug dealing. Armistead’s lawyers are fighting the forfeiture.
