The Case of Handrail Hostilities

This is the interesting case of Kosoian v. Société de transport de Montréal (or STM), a public transit authority that operates a subway in Montreal and its surrounding metropolitan area.  The case was decided by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2019, but the story begins a decade earlier.

In 2009, Ms. Bela Kosoian decided to take the subway to downtown Montreal.  She entered a subway station, operated by STM, and started down an escalator to get to her train.  Next to the escalator was a sign that displayed the words “caution” and “hold handrail” and displayed a picture of a person holding the handrail.  However, Ms. Kosoian was busy looking in her bag to find money for her subway fare, so she wasn’t holding the handrail.

A police officer, Constable Fabio Comacho, happened to be on duty that day in the subway station.  He was a city police officer for the municipality of Laval but also held an appointment to act as an inspector for the subway system, in which capacity he enforced the transit authority’s bylaws.  When he saw Ms. Kosoian on the escalator, Constable Comacho asked her to hold the handrail, because he believed that the transit authority bylaws required this.  This was because the direction was displayed on the sign and because STM had given training to the constable, and other officers, that holding the handrail was a legal requirement.

Ms. Kosoian was not willing to comply with the officer’s request and an argument between her and the officer ensued.  The officer then ordered her to hold the handrail and warned her that, if she did not, he would give her a ticket.  Ms. Kosoian refused to comply with the order as she didn’t believe she had to.  Once she got to the bottom of the escalator, Constable Comacho stopped Ms. Kosoian and asked her to follow him to a nearby holding room, because he intended to write her a ticket.  Ms. Kosoian refused to follow him because she didn’t believe she’d done anything wrong, and she then tried to leave. 

At this point, Constable Comacho and another officer physically took hold of Ms. Kosoian by her arms and escorted her to the holding room, which had a surveillance camera.  Once in the room, Constable Comacho asked Ms. Kosoian for her ID so he could write up her ticket, but she refused and asked to speak with a lawyer.  The officers then told Ms. Kosoian that she was under arrest and began to search her bag to find her ID.  When she objected to the search, the officers handcuffed Ms. Kosoian and forced her to sit on a chair with her hands behind her back.

After finding Ms. Kosoian’s ID in her bag, the officers then issued her with two tickets: a $100 ticket for not holding the handrail and a $320 ticket for hindering an inspector in the performance of their duties.  The handcuffs were then removed, and she was permitted to leave.

The day following the arrest, Ms. Kosoian’s husband contacted STM and filed a complaint about her treatment.  He also formally requested that the video surveillance tapes of the holding room be given to him.  However, STM did not respond to this request and the tapes ended up being automatically erased after 5 days.

Also, in the days following the arrest, Ms. Kosoian sought medical treatment and it was here that a doctor diagnosed her with post traumatic stress from the incident, as well as a sprained wrist.

In 2012, Ms. Kosoian went to trial in Municipal Court for her two tickets.  The judge decided that he was not convinced beyond reasonable doubt that she had violated a bylaw, and so Ms. Kosoian was found not guilty, and the tickets thrown out.

After her tickets were thrown out at trial, Ms. Kosoian commenced a lawsuit against Constable Comacho and STM for the 2009 incident, arguing that the officer had acted unlawfully and asking for $69,000.00 in damages.  When the suit went to trial in the Court of Quebec, the judge ruled against Ms. Kosoian, finding that the officers had been acting reasonably and lawfully.  Indeed, the judge said that Ms. Kosoian was the one who had been acting unreasonably for her failure to cooperate with the officer’s instructions.

Ms. Kosoian’s appealed this decision to a higher court, the Quebec Court of Appeal, but the majority of the court (two of the three judges) also ruled against her.  Among other things, the majority ruled that Constable Comacho had been acting reasonably, because he believed that holding the handrail was a legal requirement and had been taught this in his training.  Like the trial judge, they also stated that Ms. Kosoian had been unreasonable in refusing to comply with the officer’s instructions.

Ms. Kosoian appealed again, and the case then went to the Supreme Court of Canada.  In the Supreme Court, the nine justices unanimously agreed to overturn the decisions of the two lower courts.  They ruled that Constable Comacho had acted unlawfully and unreasonably.  They found that not all signs posted in the subway were legally enforceable, and this included the sign that directed persons to hold the escalator railings. 

The Supreme Court found that some signs were legally enforceable because they were based on actual bylaws, but other signs – like the one about holding the escalator railing – were only warnings, not legal requirements.  The officer had misunderstood the law and had thought something was a bylaw violation when it really was not.  He had given out a ticket for a bylaw violation that did not actually exist.

In addition, since the officer had given out a ticket for this non-existent offence not only was the ticket invalid, but so was the arrest.  After all, Constable Comacho’s purpose in arresting Ms. Kosoian was to identify her so he could issue the ticket, because she had refused to cooperate and voluntarily identify herself.  But if the ticket was for an offence that didn’t exist, well that meant he was arresting her for nothing, and the arrest was unlawful.  Although it might have been impolite for Ms. Kosoian to refuse to identify herself and to walk off when the officer was trying to write the ticket, she had no legal obligation to cooperate since the ticket was for an offence that did not actually exist.

Further, the Supreme Court ruled that, just because a police officer was told that something was the law in their training, they are not necessarily entitled to rely on that if it turns out their training was wrong.  An officer’s training can be considered when deciding whether an officer acted reasonably, but officers are still expected to use their own judgment.   In the words of the Supreme Court, “they must be able to exercise judgment with respect to the applicable law and cannot rely blindly on the training and instructions received.”

For the harm that Ms. Kosoian suffered due to her unlawful arrest, the Supreme Court awarded her $20,000 in damages.

SOURCES:

1.        Case in Brief: Kosoian v. Société de transport de Montréal. (2019, November 29). Supreme Court of Canada Website. https://www.scc-csc.ca/case-dossier/cb/2019/38012-eng.aspx. Retrieved on February 1, 2024.

2.        Full Supreme Court Judgment: Kosoian v. Société de transport de Montréal. (2019, November 29). Supreme Court of Canada Website. https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/18050/index.do. Retrieved on February 1, 2024.

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