Drug charges withdrawn due to strip search

A Colborne Street man with dreams of starting a hunting business was told to look for a new plan when he was sentenced in Brantford’s Ontario Court recently.

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“That’s not going to happen. You’re the last person this court and this community ever wants to have a gun,” Justice Colette Good told 27-year-old Colton James Etmanski.

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“You have no business being in possession of a gun anywhere.”

Good said Etmanski had four previous convictions for assault-type behavior and two involved weapons.

In court, he pleaded guilty to 10 counts of being in possession of identity documents that were either stolen or not his, failure to comply with an order to remain with his safety, possession of a firearm while prohibited and having a shotgun without a license.

“After today, you’re not going to possess weapons again for any reason.”

Etmanski was arrested in June 2022 when police raided an apartment and found a large quantity of drugs and, secreted in a ceiling hatch, a safe with an unregistered shotgun in it. He was under a court order not to possess weapons at the time.

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A federal prosecutor with Drew the drug charges and other lawyers came to an agreement for a guilty plea of ​​two years less one day in jail because, when Etmanski was arrested, he was improperly strip searched, the judge learned.

“Normally when somebody is on an order not to possess a firearm and when they’re breaching that type of court order, it’s not the expectation they would get (such a) sentence,” Good said. The judge pointed out Etmanski also was arrested almost three months later for a new series of offenses when he was found to have dozens of drivers’ licenses and health cards that weren’t his.

The lawyers in the case explained that, during the drug investigation, Etmanski had been strip searched and that could have easily led to all his charges from that day being thrown out.

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“So the strip search ought not to have occurred? And the Crown would have faced an uphill battle to get evidence in?” urged the judge and the lawyers agreed.

Good said it’s important for a community concerned about gun violence to understand why some firearm charges warrant a lower sentence, but she declined to go as low as the 564 days of time served suggested by Etmanski’s lawyer.

“Brantford is becoming an extremely violent community. We’re one of the most violent communities in this country and a lot of that violence is caused by persons who unlawfully possess firearms.”

When the judge invited Etmanski to speak, he told her that, despite terrible jail conditions that included a hunger strike, COVID outbreak and triple bunking, he was “grateful and grateful” for his incarceration.

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“It gave me a lot of time to think. I was going down a bad path and doing things that are out of character for me. I got laid off work and started partying and using drugs.

“I feel like this time incarcerated saved me from something even worse.”

The judge said a two-year sentence was still at the “low end of the scale” and, going to trial over the multiple stolen identity cards would have taken weeks of valuable court time.

Due to two misconduct reports Etmanski received while in custody, Good declined to enhance his time served even further, leaving him with a further 166 days to serve.

She encouraged Etmanski to continue working on a long term plan for his eventual release.

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