From the Toronto Star, I'm Kevin Donovan, and this is season four of suspicion.

Murder on Mount Olive.

To help you understand more about the case of Chris Sheriff, we're doing a number of bonus episodes expanding

on themes in the series. Today, smokescreen, the perils of using confidential informants and

hearsay evidence when a man's freedom is at stake. Why don't you start by telling me your name and

what you do for a living? So, my name is Dean Embry. I'm a defense lawyer in Toronto. I'm a partner at Embry Dan,

which is me and Aaron Dan. I have a practice, and I've been practicing since 2004. I've been a

defense lawyer in my entire career. What do you see as a role of a defense lawyer in our justice system?

My job, I get hired to try to help clients win their case and be acquitted, if I can,

or get them out of trouble with the least amount of consequences, I guess. But the way we do that is just by trying to keep everybody honest and make sure

the rules are applied fairly, so there's a fair trial.

What I want to explore with you today, Dean, is this concept of the confidential informant

or the CI, as they're often referred to.

Can we just kind of break it down at the start and tell me what is a confidential informant in the court system?

So a confidential informant is someone who's given the police information on the promise of confidentiality.

So there's an explicit or sometimes even implicit agreement whereby a person

will tell the police or the officer something on the understanding that their identity will

never be revealed to anyone else, quite frankly, and most importantly, not revealed to the defense.

And how does that, in your experience, come about?

How does that, it's almost a contract between a police officer and the CI?

Yeah, it's almost a contract.

Sometimes it's explicitly a contract when there's confidential informants who are ongoing

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