A Campbell River man caught at a storage facility with two loaded handguns will serve his full four-year sentence, after losing on appeal.
In January, 2023, all on-duty officers and a police dog arrested Preston Hale Jaramillo after receiving a tip he was at the facility. There was a warrant out for his arrest for aggravated assault.
However, after arresting him, they noticed an open bag containing two loaded handguns, .38 calibre revolvers, in contravention of a previous firearms restriction.
He pled guilty to firearms and the assault charges and because of his extensive criminal record involving drug trafficking and violence, received a sentence of four years and three months.
However, the judge said his Charter rights were violated by the deployment of a police dog and reduced the sentence by 11 months.
During the arrest, the police dog remained on-leash and under control, never biting or touching the suspect. However, because the dog barked and behaved in a manner Jaramillo considered “highly threatening,” his lawyer argued that it violated his Charter right to “security of the person” and constituted excessive force. The judge agreed and granted the sentence reduction in a December 23, 2024 decision.
The Crown appealed and this week the Court of Appeal overturned the sentence reduction.
In his written reasons for judgment, Justice J. Christopher Grauer found that the dog handler’s actions were consistent with provincial policing policy, and that although the suspect claimed he couldn’t hear police commands because of the barking dog, he still complied, and no excessive force was used.
“I can accept hypothetically that, if the respondent’s ability to respond in compliance with the demands of the police had been hampered by panic and an inability to hear caused by the [police service dog], so that the response was non-compliant with serious consequences, then the manner in which the dog was deployed could possibly rise to the level of excessive force. But that is not what happened. The respondent complied,” Grauer said.
The suspect tried to claim he was scared because of a previous incident in which Jared Lowndes was shot and killed by police in the Willow Point Tim Hortons drive-through, after he stabbed a police dog to death, and that a criminal friend of his had been bitten by the same dog.
Grauer said the presence of the dog and discretion of the handler “instead encouraged the respondent’s compliance. It certainly fell well short of state-imposed harm that caused serious psychological prejudice,” he said.
The suspect also claimed police pointed a gun at him, which was not true – no officers drew their guns, Grauer said.
He found the previous judge’s conclusions that Jaramillo’s Charter rights were violated was “problematic” and failed to consider the totality of the situation, and overturned the sentence reduction.
