The question for the judge in the end was simple -- did Doods, a German Shepherd police dog, sit or not?
If she did then police had grounds for searching a minivan for drugs -- in which they found 27,500 pills of deadly fentanyl. But if Doods didn't sit, then the stop and search could be considered illegal.
Unfortunately for the police, Doods was seen only to give a "partial" sit which the judge ruled was "highly ambiguous," and certainly not a clear signal that drugs were present in the minivan.
In the end, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Michael Brundrett found in a pre-trial ruling that the search was illegal and the five 17.5-lbs bags of pills were therefore excluded from the evidence. The driver, Sandor Rigo, was acquitted.
The road to trial started from a traffic stop in April 2017. Cpl. Clayton Catellier was doing traffic patrol on Highway 1 near Chilliwack, B.C. when a brown Ford Windstar minivan ripped up behind him, some 15 kilometres per hour over the speed limit. Catellier pulled the van over.
