Murder charge tossed

Helen Montgrand can't get her son's final moments out of her mind.

Mason Montgrand was 21 years old when he was killed at an Edmonton maximum security prison in 2011.

A trial for the fellow inmate charged in his death, Lance Regan, was to begin this fall.

But Alberta Court of Queen's Bench Justice Stephen Hillier tossed the charge against Regan in October, deciding his constitutional right to be tried in a reasonable time had been violated. The Crown is appealing.

"I'm going crazy thinking about my boy, how many times he got stabbed," Helen Montgrand said through sobs from her home in La Loche, Sask.

"I'm going crazy thinking about him all the time and it's not fair to let that person go."

The stay of Regan's first-degree murder charge was one of the more high-profile decisions to come down after a Supreme Court ruling this summer established what constitutes an unreasonable trial delay.

The top court, in deciding to set aside the drug convictions of Barrett Richard Jordan, set time limits of 18 months in provincial court and 30 months in a superior court from a charge to a trial's end.

However, the new framework set out in the Jordan case factors in exceptional circumstances and provides some flexibility for dealing with cases that were already in the system through so-called transitional exceptions.

"Jordan has not led to dramatically more stays," said Steve Coughlan with Dalhousie University's Schulich School Law. "However, it has led to dramatically more concern about preventing delay in the criminal justice system.

"That is a good thing from everyone's point of view."

In the Regan case, Hillier calculated the total delay at 62.5 months, but subtracted 24 months he attributed to the defence. He determined the remaining 38.5 months could not be justified.

Another high-profile Alberta case went the other way.

Last Thursday, Queen's Bench Justice Glen Poelman dismissed a stay application for three men convicted in the 2013 swarming death of Lukas Strasser-Hird, saying the Crown reasonably relied on the old rules that factored in the seriousness of the crime and institutional delays. Poelman determined the trial exceeded the Jordan ceiling, but by less than a month.

Franz Cabrera, Joch Pouk and Assmar Shlah are to be sentenced in the new year. Appeals are in the works.

Alberta Justice says there have been 36 Jordan applications since the summer and so far seven have been dismissed and five have been granted.