Canada

At 2 a.m. one night in March 2023, two Ottawa police officers pulled into a shopping plaza at the corner of Merivale and Baseline roads to get food at a fast food restaurant when they noticed something strange in the lot: a parked red Subaru, which was running, with someone asleep in the driver's seat.

That someone turned out to be a 29-year-old man known to police. And inside the vehicle, Const. Anthony Kiwan and Const. Ali Sabeeh found everything they needed to put him away for a while.

In plain view on the back seat was a prohibited Glock handgun with a round in the chamber and a prohibited over-capacity magazine capable of holding 30 rounds attached. The officers also found significant quantities of meth, cocaine, crack and Oxycodone pills. And to top it off, on his cellphone were pictures and videos of the man:

• Posing with 14 handguns, sometimes with multiple guns in the same image, some of which were equipped with prohibited over-capacity magazines.
• Preparing and packaging what looked like drugs.
• Flaunting large piles of cash.

But last month, he walked out of the Ottawa Courthouse a free and innocent man after the trial against him collapsed.

All the evidence found in the Subaru was excluded because the officers had seriously breached the man's Charter rights. They'd detained him under the guise of a sham impaired driving investigation, falsified their reports, then continued the lie in court under oath, according to the transcript of a decision read in court last month by Ontario Court Justice Mitch Hoffman.