OTTAWA -- The Supreme Court of Canada ruled Friday that a Crown prosecutor was not acting maliciously when he prosecuted 12 members of a Saskatchewan family in the early 1990s after three foster children accused them of sexual abuse and bizarre satanic ritual abuse.
The ruling -- which clarifies standards for when wrongly accused individuals can sue for malicious prosecution -- overturns two earlier decisions in the Saskatchewan courts that found Matthew Miazga liable for building a case against foster parents Dale and Anita Klassen and members of their extended family.
The Saskatchewan government has supported Miazga in his lengthy court battle, asserting that a ruling against him could have a chilling effect on prosecutors, causing them to err on the side of caution in pursuit of wrongdoing to the detriment of public safety.
The Supreme Court unanimously concluded that the case against Miazga did not meet the stringent standards, set out by the court 20 years ago, for suing Crowns for maliciously prosecuting innocent people.
"In this case, there is no evidence to support a finding of malice," Justice Louise Charron wrote in the 7-0 decision.
She concluded that the trial judge who found Miazga liable in 2003 made a "palpable and overriding error" when he ruled that Miazga could not have had a subjective belief that he had reasonable grounds to pursue the case and that he, therefore, acted out of malice.
"The absence of a subjective belief in sufficient grounds, while a relevant factor, does not equate with malice," wrote Charron.
The three foster children were age four, four and seven when they were apprehended in 1987 from their deaf mute, alcoholic and sexually abusive, biological parents, who were later convicted.
The youngsters were placed in the Klassen home and, in the following years, accused their foster family of sexual abuse and satanic ritual abuse, including animal sacrifice and drinking their blood, and cutting up the children themselves to obtain their blood to drink, and forcing them to eat feces and drink urine.
In 1993, criminal charges against all but one member of the Klassen family were stayed and the children later admitted they had made up the story. One family member, Peter Klassen, pleaded guilty to four counts of sexual abuse.
In ruling against Miazga in 2003, the trial judge questioned how the prosecutor or anyone else could have possibly believed the children's "patently absurd" story of sexual and ritual abuse at the hands of their foster family, particularly when there was no corroboration.
The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal upheld the decision in 2007.
"The judge clearly believed it should have been evident to anyone, from the outset of the investigation and throughout the prosecution, that the evidence of the children, because of the bizarre and incredible nature of some of their allegations, and their propensity to lie, was not sufficiently credible or reliable to support the laying of charges or the prosecution of them," said the 2-1appeal court ruling.
The Supreme Court decision to overrule the Saskatchewan courts comes 20 years after it first established a test for malicious prosecution in a case involving nurse Susan Nelles, who was falsely accused of baby deaths at the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children.
In the landmark 1989 ruling, the court discarded blanket immunity for prosecutors, saying that they can be successfully sued. The bench, however, cautioned that it was not open season on Crowns and it established a stringent test for lawsuits to succeed.
The Saskatchewan government has paid the Klassen family $2.46-million in a 2004 damages agreement.
Brian Dueck, the police officer who investigated the case and laid the charges, was also found liable for malicious prosecution, but he did not appeal the decision.
