The BC Supreme Court has denied an appeal by a 54-year-old Kamloops driver who was convicted of two counts of dangerous driving causing death.
Wayne Rodney Fedan was the driver of a pick-up truck that was involved in a crash that killed Brittany Plotnikoff, 20, and her boyfriend Kenneth Craigdallie, 38, in March 2010. According to court documents, Fedan lost control of his 2004 GMC Sierra pick-up truck when he attempted to negotiate a curve in a residential area of Kamloops. At the time of the accident, Fedan was speeding well above the posted 50 km/hour limit. The force of the impact caused the vehicle to go over a curb, break through a fence, and side-swipe a tree. Neither passengers were wearing seatbelts and were killed.
Fedan was charged with two counts of impaired driving causing death, two counts of operating a motor vehicle “over .08” causing death, and two counts of dangerous driving causing death. Fedan tried to appeal his convictions of dangerous driving causing death, by arguing that data seized from his truck’s ‘black box’ was incorrectly admitted at his trial.
After police seized Fedan’s vehicle, they removed the manufacturer-installed sensing diagnostic module (SDM) and analyzed the data.
“The retrieved data provided critical and highly reliable information with respect to the speed, throttle, and braking of the vehicle in the five seconds immediately before the collision,” said Justice Smith in her decision. “The central issue in this appeal is whether the removal of the SDM and the downloading of its data violated Mr. Fedan’s charter right. Mr. Fedan submits the warrantless seizure of the SDM and the search of its data was unreasonable, violated his charter right, and therefore the information contained in the data should not have been admitted into evidence.”
While Fedan argued that the data within the SDM was like a personal computer, thus private information, Justice Smith disagreed stating that the device did not identify drivers personally, but rather just generally.
“Most significantly it contained no intimate details of the driver’s biographical core, lifestyle or personal choices, or information that could be said to directly compromise his “dignity, integrity and autonomy,” said Smith.
Smith concluded that the data was retrieved properly and admitted into evidence correctly; as a result the appeal has been dismissed.
In October 2014, Fedan was sentenced to three years in prison and banned from driving for three years. He was not convicted of impaired driving after blood samples were ruled inadmissible.
