Deepak Paradkar is fighting extradition to the United States.Mark Blinch/The Canadian Press
The Ontario Court of Appeal has decided against revoking bail for a Toronto-area criminal lawyer accused of conspiring with Ryan Wedding to commit murder of an informant.
Crown lawyers had argued that Deepak Paradkar should not have been granted bail in December under a $5-million plan that keeps him under house arrest.
“The bail review application is dismissed,” Justice Katherine van Rensburg wrote in a decision released Thursday.
The U.S. Department of Justice has charged Mr. Paradkar with drug trafficking and witness tampering and also alleges he was part of a conspiracy to murder an FBI witness in Colombia.
Mr. Paradkar, who was arrested in November in the Toronto area, faces extradition to the United States. None of the allegations against him have been proven in court.
The 63-year-old, who once promoted himself as Canada’s “cocaine lawyer,” is one of several people north of the border fighting extradition in the case, all of whom allegedly worked for or helped Mr. Wedding. The Canadian former Olympic snowboarder was arrested in Mexico in January on charges of murder conspiracy and drug trafficking, and transported to the United States.
The U.S. Department of Justice is seeking to put these accused, including Mr. Paradkar, on trial in California to face charges they collectively plotted tonnes of cocaine shipments throughout the continent and enforced loyalty through murder-for-hire conspiracies, including the 2025 shooting death of a police informant in a restaurant in Medellin.
Mr. Paradkar also faces allegations that, while working as a criminal lawyer, he spied on accused drug dealers to make sure they would not inform on Mr. Wedding.
In December, Ontario Superior Court Justice Peter Bawden agreed to release Mr. Paradkar on bail pending an extradition hearing. For the past six months, he has been put on a strict house-arrest plan involving electronic monitoring. His $5-million Toronto-area home would be surrendered if he were to flee.
Crown attorney Heather Graham appealed the release ruling in April, arguing the career criminal lawyer has unexplained wealth and that his bail surety – his wife – is unsuitable.
She also argued that Mr. Paradkar’s release casts the Canadian criminal justice system into disrepute given the gravity of the allegations he faces.
“That murder that Mr. Paradkar is accused of having conspired in, that murder was carried out in broad daylight by shooting a victim in the head,” Ms. Graham told the Ontario Court of Appeal this spring.
“Mr. Paradkar was an officer of the court at the time of the commission of these offences,” she added. “The court ought to have looked at the status of the victim in this case – a justice system participant, an informant. This is a highly aggravating circumstance and it had a hugely detrimental impact on the rule of law.”
But the Court of Appeal rejected these arguments, saying the lower court was not wrong to let Mr. Paradkar go.
“A reasonable person would recognize the primacy of the presumption of innocence and the constitutional guarantee of reasonable bail unless there is just cause for detention,” Justice van Rensburg wrote.
The Court of Appeal ruling reiterates that Mr. Paradkar has incentives to comply with bail, because if he flees he could lose his home and access to his family forever.
“A reasonable person, fully informed of the facts, would recognize that bail decisions can be difficult and would find reassurance in the application judge’s efforts to fully and carefully explain his conclusions,” Justice van Rensburg wrote.
When Mr. Paradkar applied for bail, he appeared in the witness box to promise that he would seek to stay put in Canada and lawfully resist extradition.
“I know it’s a long haul,” he said. “I know there’s a fight to be had.”
Defence lawyer Ravin Pillay could not be reached for comment. The Justice Canada international assistance group had no immediate reaction to the new ruling.
The wider Ryan Wedding gang conspiracy case in Los Angeles has grown to involve more than 30 arrested suspects, including about a dozen co-accused still in Canada who are also fighting extradition to the U.S. Extradition hearings rely on summaries of evidence and lower standards of proof than criminal prosecutions, but still take years to play out.