Four men alleged to have participated in shipping hollowed out logs filled with marijuana from the North Okanagan-Shuswap to California have lost their appeal of an extradition order to the United States.
A BC Court of Appeal document reveals that three judges were unanimous in dismissing the appeal of Darrell Joseph Romano, Ivan Djuracic, Aaron Randolph Anderson and Jamie Daniel Nenasheff versus the federal justice minister on behalf of the United States of America.
A trial has not yet taken place nor have the accused been found guilty, but they can now be surrendered to California to stand trial.
The four men appealing were listed in previous court documents as living in Kelowna and Vernon, while the locations listed in the alleged log exporting operation included Deep Creek, Armstrong, Vernon and Kelowna.
Court documents providing an overview of the evidence state that from March 2006 to November 2006, a criminal organization with members in Canada and the United States distributed hundreds of pounds of high-grade marijuana from B.C. to California.
It stated that on at least nine occasions between March and September 2006, hollowed-out logs were imported into the U.S. by an American citizen who had been convinced to set up a log home business in Southern California that eventually became a front for the distribution of pot.
The documents outlined the movement of logs between a ‘workshop’ in Armstrong, where the logs were filled with plastic bags of marijuana, a property on Firehall Frontage Road in Deep Creek, and California.
The BC Court of Appeal, in its ruling dated Nov. 16 in Vancouver, outlines submissions the accused made to the Justice Minister regarding the 2015 extradition order.
They posed six arguments: “what the applicants maintain is the lack of an evidentiary basis that would establish they had knowledge of the destination of the logs; what is said to be the weakness of the prosecution’s case; the applicants’ low level of involvement in the purchase of marijuana in British Columbia and its transportation for sale in California; the delay in the proceedings; the American sentencing regime under which significantly longer periods of incarceration would be imposed than by a Canadian court and which provides for a mandatory minimum 15-year sentence if, but only if, the applications were to plead not guilty and be convicted after a trial; and the applicants’ personal circumstances which are free of criminal records.”
In upholding the justice minister’s decision, the appeal court considered – and dismissed – two main arguments: whether the accused were aware of the destination of the marijuana, and whether surrendering the accused to the American sentencing regime would violate their legal rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.