Gillian Guess

The court's failure to explain officially its depart from precedent seems ill-advised. While it is difficult to see why Ms. Guess should not have been privy to the secret hearings and then bound by court order to disclose nothing, that is not to say definitively there could have been no countervailing state concern of sufficient magnitude to overcome Ms. Guess' interest in a fair trial. Perhaps there is some concern or group of concerns that might demand secret hearings, but the court certainly owes Ms. Guess, the public, and future jurists an explanation as to what—in conceptual if not specific terms—those concerns are and what will qualify for the same secret treatment in the future. With secret trials being antithetical to the notion of a free and open society, it seems reasonable that their use should at least demand an explanation. In an interesting twist, the court may have injured itself, as the lack of any explanation for its decision has undermined the court's credibility with numerous observers who have suggested that improper pressure on the court from certain powerful figures in the Canadian government, as opposed to any compelling legal justification, was the real reason for holding the hearings in secret.

Her story was the subject of a 2004 movie, The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess, and was the basis of the Law and Order episode "Hubris".

In May 2001, Peter Gill and his associates Budai and Kim were ordered to be retried by the British Columbia Court of Appeal on the first degree murder charges. However, the Crown never retried them. Instead, Peter Gill was convicted for obstruction of justice. He received a sentence of six years in prison.

Guess was convicted of obstruction of justice. After being convicted she said, "I have been convicted for falling in love and nothing more. I have not committed a crime." She was sentenced to 18 months in prison but was released after serving just 12 weeks in a minimum security women's facility known as "Camp Cupcake." She appealed her sentence, but the appeal was dismissed on November 2, 2000.

In 1998, Crown prosecutor Joseph Bellows laid an obstruction of justice charge against Gillian Guess, arguing she had violated s. 139 (2) of the Canadian Criminal Code . Guess pleaded not guilty. Guess seemed to enjoy all the media attention she received during the trial, and she seemed determined to prove that she had done nothing illegal. She said, "After eight months even the trial judge started looking good."

The trial of Gillian Guess became a media sensation, with reporters coming from as far away as Germany and New Zealand to cover the trial. The Gillian Guess story was also told on the news magazine show Inside Edition, and on the ABC News Show 20/20. Gillian Guess was also photographed for Marie Claire magazine. In 1998, Gillian Guess wrote an article in a Simon Fraser University campus newspaper named "The Peak."

In the case of Regina v. Gill, Peter Gill was charged with two counts of first-degree murder. Five of his associates, Bhupinder (Bindy) Johal, Rajinder Kumar Benji, Michael Kent Budai, Ho Sik (Phil) Kim, and Sun News Lal were tried with him on the murder charges. The trial began on February 27, 1995 and lasted eight months. It was one of the longest, most expensive and most complicated trials in British Columbia history. Gillian Guess was selected to serve as a juror for the murder trial. During the trial, Guess and Gill started a relationship that became sexual.

According to the Vancouver Police Department, Peter Gill (also known as Preet Sarbjit Gill) and his brother-in-law ran a gang involved in the drug trade in Vancouver. Police believed that in February 1994, the gang lured Jimsher Dosanjh (aged 26) to an alley, where they murdered him with machine guns. Two months later, the gang allegedly also murdered Dosanjh's brother Ranjit.

Gillian Guess (born 1955) is a Vancouver woman who was convicted in 1998 of obstruction of justice after becoming romantically involved with a murder defendant while she was a juror in his 1995 trial.