Edmonton’s police chief says the force is working to repair its relationship with Crown prosecutors after provoking a public confrontation with them over a plea deal in a child killing.
“We’re hoping … we won’t have to do that again,” Chief Warren Driechel told reporters Friday, after he was formally promoted from interim chief to the top job.
“It was a last resort for us to try to get some kind of traction or motion forward. This was about us trying to open up that dialogue.”
Driechel made headlines earlier this month when he urged Alberta’s justice ministry, in a public letter, to overturn a pending plea deal for a woman charged with killing an eight-year-old girl.
Police said the deal for the woman facing second-degree murder to plead guilty to manslaughter, which typically carries a less severe sentence, would be a travesty of justice given the horrific nature of the crime.
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Police in the letter and later at a news conference with their legal counsel said the case reflects larger, longtime problems with prosecutors, including keeping police in the dark on key case developments.
The letter also warned police would release key details of the woman’s case if there was plea deal, so the public could judge for itself whether justice had been done.
The accused, a 29-year-old woman who can’t be identified, ended up pleading guilty to manslaughter last week. She has yet to be sentenced.
Driechel’s letter saw critics, including defence lawyers, accuse police of straying way out of their lane, from being finders of fact to deciders of how cases should be handled in court.
Shawn King, president of the Criminal Trial Lawyers’ Association, likened the letter an “extortion tactic.”
But Alberta Premier Danielle Smith applauded the move, saying if the Crown doesn’t proceed to trial, the public needs to understand the circumstances surrounding the decision.
Driechel, in his first public comment on the case Friday, said he knows critics have called the letter a significant overreach but hopes it made some change.
“That plea deal is done,” he said. “It can no longer be tried in court.”
He said police tried and failed for about two months to get more details from prosecutors in the case, after hearing a plea deal was in the works, and they went public with the letter out of desperation.
Driechel said he was just trying to open a dialogue and he has since met with prosecutors. He called their relationship “good.”
“They depend on us, and we depend on them. We’ve already had initial conversations about sitting down, talking about repairing whatever it is we need to repair.”
On the day the woman pleaded guilty, prosecutors detailed chronic abuse and neglect the girl suffered. The girl, who can’t be identified because of a publication ban, had been living with the woman since September 2022.
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Court heard the woman was drinking alcohol and using methamphetamine the night of the killing. The child was found lying on the floor bleeding next to a hole in the wall, but it’s not known how she sustained her head injury.
An autopsy showed she had multiple broken bones and injuries, some of which had previously healed. She also had sepsis because of an untreated infected broken tooth, which reduced her chances of surviving the head injury.
Court heard the woman didn’t call 911 and instead asked acquaintances for help.
The child’s body was later found in a hockey bag in the back of a truck on the Samson Cree Nation in Maskwacis, south of Edmonton.
Driechel said he has reflected on the day the girl’s body was found.
“All the systems that were in place to protect her did not,” he said.
“The one thing that gave me solace was when the family said, ‘The police found her, they brought her home and they’re fighting for her.”‘
