OFF THE WIRE
VANCOUVER — The B.C. Court of Appeal on Thursday rejected an unusually light punishment for a convicted Hells Angel drug dealer, hitting him with four times the jail time and criticizing the judge’s “piecemeal” approach to sentencing.
The court ruled that Justice Peter Leask erred because he failed to take into account the damage done to the community by drugs distributed in a scheme in which John Punko participated.
The appeal court upped the sentence to five years and two months from 14 months.
RCMP Insp. Gary Shinkaruk, the officer in charge of the investigation, welcomed the decision.
“I supported the appeal ... I think it is a more appropriate sentence,” he said on Thursday, noting that the court had a very difficult task to impose sentences in such a complex case.
“I’m glad the courts are looking at it again, and I look to them to make any decisions,” he said, of an impending appeal by the Crown on the sentence of Punko’s co-accused Randy Potts.
On March 12, Leask handed two members of the Hells Angels unusually short sentences for trafficking large amounts of meth and cocaine.
Punko, 43, was handed a 14-month sentence for conspiracy to produce and deal 50 kilograms of methamphetamine, as well as trafficking five kilograms of cocaine, while Potts was given one year for his role.
The Crown had asked for 16 and 12 years, respectively.
Punko and Potts pleaded guilty last Dec. 7 to trafficking cocaine, and possessing more than $387,000 in cash that was the proceeds of crime and conspiring to produce meth in a drug lab to sell.
Leask had found a number of mitigating factors would reduce the bikers’ sentences, including an early plea, rehabilitation and that police used an agent, Michael Plante, who fed Punko’s addiction to prescription painkillers and got him involved in meth production.
At the time, he said the bikers were “pawns of police” because they were low level targets used to get to high level targets within Vancouver’s East End chapter of the Hells Angels.
But the appeal judges on Thursday found that Leask gave too much weight to those mitigating factors.
“In my opinion, the piecemeal approach used by the sentencing judge was an error in principle that caused him to give undue weight to the mitigating factors of the guilty plea and the police conduct,” said Justice David Tysoe, in the decision.
Appeal Court Justice Kenneth Smith called Punko’s charges of producing and dealing methamphetamine, as well as trafficking cocaine “serious criminal offences” and found Leask had imposed an unfit sentence for the severity of the crime and its effect on the community.
“In his consideration of the gravity of Mr. Punko’s methamphetamine offence, the judge overlooked the significant fact that a very large amount of methamphetamine produced by Mr. Punko and his partners was distributed into the illegal market — all but 8 kilograms of the approximately 50 kilograms they produced during the period covered by the indictment,” Smith wrote, in the decision.
“This very large amount of methamphetamine undoubtedly caused substantial harm directly to those unfortunate addicts who consumed it and indirectly to society in general.”
Smith said the sentence did not recognize and condemn that harm and suggested the sentence be increased to 26 months.
While two other appeal judges agreed with Smith the sentence was unfit, they said the sentence should much be longer and imposed eight years imprisonment, with a credit of 34 months for time served in pre-sentence custody, making the sentence five years and two months.
During sentencing, Leask said he would have given Punko six years if the case had gone to trial but deducted one year for the guilty plea, another for police involvement in creating the crimes and 34 months credit for time served.
In filing the appeal, Crown counsel argued Punko was a financier and a controlling mind of the meth conspiracy, already had a serious criminal record and was motivated by greed.
The bikers were charged in 2005 after a two-year, $10-million dollar police investigation code-named Project E-Pandora. A total of six Hells Angels and 13 associates were charged.
ticrawford@vancouversun.com
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