Thunder Bay’s John Tsekouras is going to prison for nine and a half years, after the Ontario court of appeal denied his drug possession and trafficking convictions.
The judges dismissed all five of Tsekouras’s grounds of appeal, including the key request to have evidence from a seized Blackberry cell phone because it was taken by police without a warrant.
That ruling is imporant, because over the course of the trial that encrypted Blackberry contained critical evidence in the text messages what were recovered from it.
The 43 year old father of four was sentenced to 11.5 years in 2015 after a lengthy 53 day trial, but because of time already served it was automatically reduced to the shorter term.
Tsekouras was one of several people arrested by Thunder Bay police in 2012 in a take down known as Project Dolphin.
After he was found guilty, police held a news conference to declared the conviction was a blow to one of northwestern Ontario’s most significant criminal organizations.