It should have been obvious during the O.J. Simpson trial that an accused with lesser means would find it hard to defend himself in that system. While some feel O.J. was "only getting off because he is rich", it really points out another key factor: that O.J.'s financial resources only helped him to level the playing field somewhat. The Los Angeles D.A.'s office has access to the resources of some 9,000 lawyers, as well as all of the various backup systems.

Environmentally, this is analogous to the system in Ontario where companies charged in environmental incidents sometimes cannot afford to fight the case unless there are extremely high stakes. Many corporations have taken the fall because of the extremely high cost of fighting back. Successful defences can easily reach $300,000, including both legal fees and the gathering of sufficient technical information to demonstrate a lack of environmental effect by the incident.

There were several incidents, pointed out during the Simpson trial, of arrogance on the part of the police department in what some feel was a "rush to judgement". These included the lack of completeness in gathering evidence by the criminologists and the coroner, as well as the prosecutors' attempts to downplay these inadequacies.

Environmentally, a remarkably similar parallel exists in Ontario where the Inspection and Enforcement division has been known to lay charges even when there is little technical merit from a scientific point of view. Sometimes opinions of very junior technical people within the Ministry have been used to postulate claims of environmental damage that would be far-fetched in the minds of anyone with mature experience in this field.

It was also obvious that the junior technical people in the Ministry sometimes did not have the backing of their supervisors or directors in their branch or division, nor their technical concurrence before collaborating with the Investigations & Enforcement officers (I & E) to form a "basis of claim". Some cases remind us of Detective Lang in the O.J. case who said, "I've got twelve convictions recently on less evidence than this one". Some Ministry prosecutors in Ontario have been spoiled by the lack of defence of the charges by many corporations who felt they could not afford to challenge them.

A large number of parallels can also be drawn with the laxity of the coroner in the O.J. case, as well as the sloppy field techniques of the criminologists and inadequate lab procedures. We know of at least one case, for instance, in a farm runoff prosecution, where it was claimed that the accidental discharge of pig manure to a rural ditch would be injurious to trout and cause severe aquatic damage.

These claims were made on the basis of estimated un-ionized ammonia calculations, and depletion of oxygen. These postulations were actually based on assumptions made for temperatures and pH of the water. These parameters could have been easily measured with field kits which are as simple as placing a probe in the water to determine temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, or any specific ion of concern.

With respect to lab procedures, I was actually involved in a case where the Ministry did not even follow their own published protocol for aquatic toxicity testing using daphnia magna in order to create a laboratory situation demonstrating an adverse effect.

If records could be obtained on the enormous cost of the I & E division, as well as all of the crown attorneys assigned to these cases, and the extremely high court costs, they would make an interesting comparison to the revenues obtained by the procedures followed on environmental charges in this province. For the many small industries that are charged and don't have the financial resources to defend themselves, why is it that we don't have a public defender in Ontario, as they do in criminal cases?