TORONTO - Opposition leaders are calling for a public inquiry into how taxpayers ended up footing an enormous legal bill to defend a wealthy former Toronto police officer who was convicted of killing his mistress.
The tab, which is estimated at more than $1 million, includes $806,960 in fees billed by defence lawyers to the province as of June 14, even though Richard Wills was once a millionaire.
Documents released this week show the runaway costs of Wills's defence -- a case which dragged on for five years before going to trial this summer-- went largely unnoticed by the Ministry of the Attorney General because it thought Legal Aid Ontario was managing the case.
"How someone with a million-and-a-half dollars in assets can dispose of their assets and then go and say,`You, the taxpayers of the province, have to pay for my six-lawyer legal bill,' is something that calls for a public inquiry,'' New Democrat Leader Howard Hampton said Friday.
An investigation is also needed get to the bottom of why Legal Aid was only double-checking the math when Wills's lawyers submitted huge bills to be passed on to the province for payment, Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory said Thursday.
"Given that the Legal Aid program has repeatedly run out of money, it's simply denying other people legal aid who are genuinely impoverished and who might need a small amount to have themselves defended properly in court,'' Tory said.
Wills, 50, was found guilty Wednesday of first-degree murder in the 2002 death of Linda Mariani, 40, whose remains were found in a garbage bin that had been stored behind a wall in his home in Richmond Hill, Ont., north of Toronto.
The case was described by some as a "freak show'' due to Wills's bizarre and often disruptive behaviour in court. The ex-cop went through a revolving door of lawyers and regularly insulted them and the presiding judge, occasionally using racist and sexist obscenities.
He also disposed of his assets -- which included five residential properties and a police pension of $1,900 a month -- to his estranged wife and three children, and applied for legal aid. According to court documents, Wills had spent about $70,000 retaining two different lawyers following his arrest in June 2002, only to fire them in quick succession.
Wills refused to agree to terms of repayment offered by legal aid. After unsuccessfully seeking to have the attorney general either pay his legal bill or have the charge stayed, Wills took over his own defence.
The former police officer's outrageous behaviour during a gruelling eight-month preliminary hearing and his inability to find a lawyer willing to represent him at Legal Aid rates forced Justice Bryan Shaughnessy's hand in granting a rare Fisher order in April 2005. That required the province to pay Wills's defence costs -- at higher rates than Legal Aid provided.
The case was virtually "untriable'' unless an experienced lawyer could be found to defend him, Shaughnessy said.
The judge amended that order in June 2006 at the request of the Ministry of the Attorney General, who were concerned that Wills's then-lawyer, Munyonzwe Hamalengwa, was submitting bills without providing many details of the costs.
Hamalengwa was ordered to meet with Legal Aid Ontario to work out a budget of hours needed to complete Wills's case and submit his accounts to the agency for vetting and approval in a manner consistent with its big-case management program.
According to court documents, Legal Aid lawyer Tom LeRoy confirmed later that month that he had met with Hamalengwa in a letter that was copied to Crown lawyer Kerry Lee Thompson, who was responsible for reviewing bills sent to the ministry for payment.
"As a result, despite the numerous and exceptionally large amount of bills forwarded to my attention from Mr. LeRoy and recommended for payment, I remained of the view that he and Mr. Wills's counsel were acting in accordance with the order of the court,'' Thompson said in a sworn affidavit dated June 2007.
Those payments, which totalled as much as $76,000 a month, didn't contain particulars of the number of hours spent or the nature of the disbursements, Thompson said.
It wasn't until a May 31, 2007, phone call with LeRoy that Thompson realized that Legal Aid was only checking Hamalengwa's arithmetic.
Legal Aid Ontario has said that while it cannot speak about individual cases due to privacy rules, it did note that such Fisher-order cases do not fall under their big-case management program.
"These cases are not Legal Aid Ontario cases and so they're not funded by Legal Aid Ontario,'' spokesman Kristian Justensen said Thursday.
The organization's responsibility in such cases to "provide advice'' to the ministry on how billings submitted by the defence lawyers would compare to their own guidelines, such as costs for witnesses, travel and court filings, he said.
