A woman convicted of smuggling a brick of fentanyl worth millions of dollars from Langley to Vancouver Island has failed to overturn her conviction in the B.C. Court of Appeal.
Hong “Carrie” Dinh was convicted of a single count of possession of fentanyl for the purpose of trafficking in 2023, and sentenced to up to eight years in prison.
On May 3, 2019, Dinh took the ferry from Swartz Bay to Tsawassen and drove to Langley, where she met with the driver of another vehicle in a parking lot.
The two exchanged bags, with Dinh putting a blue cloth bag in her truck, before she headed back towards the ferry terminal.
What Dinh didn’t know was that she was under police surveillance. A tip to CrimeStoppers had alerted the RCMP, and following the suspicious parking lot swap, her vehicle was stopped and searched before she could get on the return ferry.
The single brick of just under a kilogram of fentanyl police found in her truck was estimated to be worth between $5 and $9 million, and could have been broken down into between 200,000 to 600,000 individual doses, Justice Gordon Weatherill wrote when he sentenced Dinh to eight years in custody in 2024.
Dinh appealed her conviction, with her lawyers arguing that Weatherill had made several legal errors, and that her rights had been violated after she was arrested.
The three-judge Court of Appeal panel, however, found her conviction should stand.
The May 5 ruling, written by Justice Margot Fleming, noted there were three issues under appeal.
The first was about whether the police had the right to arrest Dinh without a warrant. Police in Canada must have reasonable grounds to believe someone is committing a crime to arrest them.
Dinh’s legal team argued that her interaction with the driver in the Langley parking lot could be considered innocuous, but Fleming disagreed.
“As the Crown observes, the less than one minute transaction coupled with Ms. Dinh’s direct travel from Victoria to an isolated part of the Langley parking lot and then back toward the ferry terminal, also aligns with the incriminating tip information,” Fleming said in her ruling.
The other two arguments in the appeal were based on violations of Dinh’s Charter rights.
Police delayed letting Dinh talk to a lawyer, at first because they were still searching for the driver of the truck involved in the drug exchange in Langley. After he was found and arrested, it was almost another hour before Dinh was allowed to contact a lawyer.
But the judge found that as soon as the senior officer involved in the case learned the other driver had been arrested, he tried to contact his fellow officers to let them know, and to offer Dinh a phone call.
Fleming did find that Dinh’s rights were violated, and that Justice Weatherill had made some errors. Dinh’s lawyers argued that this should have led to the drug evidence – the discovery of the brick of fentanyl – being thrown out.
Fleming found there were legal arguments both for and against excluding the evidence, but ultimately decided it was in society’s interests not to do so.
“I share the judge’s [Weatherill’s] view that excluding the drug evidence, almost a kilogram of fentanyl found in Ms. Dinh’s truck after her lawful arrest, would bring the administration of justice into disrepute,” Fleming wrote, dismissing the appeal.
Dinh will continue to serve her eight-year sentence.