A former Hamilton police officer currently serving a 13-year prison sentence for corruption will not face prosecution on a host of other charges, including bribing officers, perjury, obstruction of justice and gun and drug trafficking.

The Crown’s request to stay proceedings on 12 charges against Craig Ruthowsky was granted by Ontario Superior Court Justice Harrison Arrell on Tuesday.

The stay ends a decade-long legal saga involving “extremely serious” allegations but which are not in the public interest to go to trial, Assistant Judge John Pollard told the judge.

“In the Crown’s view, it is unwise to use valuable court time to retry Mr. Ruthowsky when he has been sentenced in the harshest terms possible for offenses that overlap significantly with those he would have been tried during to the second trial,” Pollard said. .

Ruthowsky’s sentence is believed to be the longest ever handed down in Canada for police corruption, and even if convicted of 12 other charges, he is unlikely to receive more jail time, Pollard said.

In exchange for the Crown dropping the remaining charges, Ruthowsky agreed not to try to appeal to the Supreme Court, Pollard said.

Ruthowsky, who is at Bath Federal Institute in Millhaven, did not attend the hearing in person or virtually.

The Crown is not required to give reasons for the stay, but decided to do so because the case “rightly attracted media attention and public scrutiny”, Pollard said.

“The allegations are serious and have the potential to damage public confidence in the administration of justice,” he said. “Accordingly, the public should know why the Crown exercised its discretion in this way.”

Suspended from police service after arrest

Ruthowsky, who served in Hamilton police’s gun and gang unit, was already suspended from the force when he was first arrested in 2015.

Toronto police had caught him on wiretaps giving advice to a drug dealer. The calls were intercepted as part of Project Pharaoh, a massive Toronto police investigation into gang activity.

Ruthowsky’s trial took place in 2018, when he was 44 years old. A jury found him guilty of providing protection for criminals for money and selling police secrets.

Judge Robert Clark sentenced him to 12-and-a-half years in prison, with six months already served, more than originally requested by the Crown and defense, and to pay $250,000 – the amount he took in bribes.

“The conduct for which (Ruthowsky) must now answer was motivated by pure and unbridled greed,” Clark said at the time.

Ruthowsky appealed his conviction while facing a number of other charges from a parallel investigation by Hamilton police into events that took place between 2009 and 2012.

Those charges, which were dropped Tuesday, included one count each of bribery of officers, perjury and obstruction of justice, two counts of breach of trust of a public official, three counts of drug trafficking and four counts of arms trafficking.

The judge agrees to the suspension

The Crown decided to postpone a trial on those charges until after Ruthowsky’s appeal, Pollard said. If he won and a new trial was ordered, the Crown would pursue both sets of charges simultaneously in a “much larger trial”.

But the call has been delayed, in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, Pollard said. It wasn’t until earlier this year that the court upheld Ruthowsky’s conviction and sentence.

In that time, the Crown’s case has not collapsed, but parts of it have “naturally eroded”, Pollard said.

“The dynamics of litigation would be different now than they were in 2019.”

Ruthowsky “vigorously disputes” the allegations, and the trial should have dealt with complex legal issues and lasted at least two months, Pollard said.

Defense lawyer Kelsey Flanagan supported the Crown’s decision. She told the court that Ruthowsky suffered “significant collateral consequences”.

The proceedings affected his family, including two children, Flanagan said.

He resigned from the Hamilton Police Service in 2018.

The trial for the second set of charges was reportedly “hotly contested” and the outcome “far from certain,” she said.

The judge agreed, saying a stay “makes sense to me.”