Mr. Big

I thought this would be an interesting way to kill 90 minutes and see how the Mr Big sting works.

Instead, we get a poorly-shot example of blind devotion to one's family. While that is understandable, don't try to free your murdering brother by trying to paint others as bad people and crying "conspiracy" conspiracy!"

The filmmaker seems to have skipped over a couple of VERY critical facts about this sting:

• Her brother was convicted after a trial lasting six months. The confession was only a small part of it.

• His trial has been appealed twice, and both times a higher court saw no reason that the trial was anything less than fair. He is guilty.

• During his confession to the murderers to Mr Big, she fails to tell us that the two murderers told details of how they did the murders that were not known to the public, nor in fact known to "Mr Big."

• Her only contact with the RCMP was a hastily recorded phone call to an officer who she blindsided with questions he obviously could not or would not answer and certainly could not respond to without permission of superiors. This ambush was patently unfair of her, especially when the only footage she actually used was the officer quite understandably going "uh ..." and "um ..." and she didn't use any footage of him telling her many many times exactly why he could not release the information she was asking for.

• Every other "expert" in the documentary has a HUGE vested interest in getting hired in the future to testify against the prosecution. They are what are called "professional experts" and they make a living giving testimony geared toward the side that hires them.

By the way, courts have clamped down a LOT of these people who make a living as "professional experts" in court. They are now legally OBLIGATED to swear an oath that they will only provide testimony to help the court, and cannot lie or omit information that may be used to help only one side. So every single one of these "experts" that she interviews just make her look naive as well as uninformed.

The biggest single issue with this documentary is that she didn't do the slightest bit of research on WHY the Supreme Court of Canada has accepted these kinds of testimony. If she had, she would know that the Supreme Court gives the police VERY LITTLE LATITUDE in how they can carry out these stings and how much weight a court or a jury can put on "jailhouse confessions." Basically, it must be a "double-blind" situation, in which NEITHER the officer playing Mr Big nor the supervising officer are allowed access to ANY evidence from the case. The supervising officer and the Mr Big officer cannot be from the same area as the murders, and Mr Big is not allowed to lead questions in any way. He/she is not allowed to make any comments that indicate they know anything about the murder.

You can actually see that in the police tapes. Mr Big doesn't ask any leading questions, even as innocuous as "So she struggled a lot?' They instead ask, "So, what happened next?" and "What did you do next?"

Basically, this was a one-sided poorly-done documentary naively shot about an evil and cold- blooded murderer who should spend the rest of his life in jail. Her despicable brother is NOT the poster child for the wrongfully accused.

This documentary is the most accessible place to start for anyone wishing to understand the inherent risks of Royal Canadian Mounted Police undercover operations. It is also a refreshing alternative look at the criminal justice process for those who are tired of mass media's sensationalized glorification of good-guy-cop true crime stories. Director Tiffany Burns reveals how justice suffers when police place the goal of extracting confessions above the goal of uncovering the real truth needed to carry out justice.

Before Burns made her film, the Canadian public had a naive trust in the RCMP. The film revealed that RCMP undercover operations cross the line into highly unethical territory, sometimes resulting in wrongful convictions that destroy lives. RCMP Mr. Big tactics are in fact illegal in most other countries. Since the film came out, criminology scholars such as Kouri Keenan have been inspired to carry out in-depth research on the risks of Mr. Big stings. This has resulted in a slow shift in public perception of RCMP Mr. Big stings. In July of 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled to limit the admissibility of evidence gathered during RCMP undercover operations. Although this SCC decision doesn't go far enough to protect suspects from wrongful conviction, it is at least a start. This transition in perceptions of Mr. Big stings could not have happened without this documentary.

Pretty h's review is dead-on. This is a very biased version of the Burns/Rafay case aimed at exonerating Tiffany Burns' brother. It is also very amateurish. It is repetitive, many parts are staged and it does not deliver on providing compelling details about other Mr. Big sting operations (besides the director's brother's experience) to validate her thesis. It also comes off as a vanity piece. Although one might admire her devotion and commitment to her brother, the exercise comes off like more of the same arrogance and entitlement her brother is notorious for. For those who know more about the case, it's quite shocking that it is given airtime and has been featured at serious film festivals.

Odds are some of the people interested in seeing this documentary have already seen the "48 Hours Mystery" about Sebastian Burns and Atif Rafay, two Canadian teenagers who were convicted of murdering the Rafay family in order to fund their screenplay (which bore frightening similarities to the crime itself). That show only barely touches on this "Mr. Big" character, and it's certainly a subject worth studying further, which this documentary tries to do.

As the summary indicates, "Mr. Big" is not just one undercover RCMP officer who may or may not have coerced the secretly videotaped confessions from Burns and Rafay; "Mr. Big" is a largely unknown and under-the-radar operation used by the RCMP to catch criminals up in carefully orchestrated "organized crime" and then bargaining to get them out of trouble if they'll just confess to whatever the RCMP originally sought when enlisting them in this charade. Now THAT is something that would make Canadians sit up and take notice if it were to hit the nightly news.

The trouble with this documentary is that its maker, Tiffany Burns, is clearly too invested in presenting the wrongs committed against her brother Sebastian (she believes him to be completely innocent, which is his claim as well; some who saw the "48 Hours" investigation might have serious reservations about that) to give a thorough look into "Mr. Big" as a whole. She does conduct a few interviews with other ostensibly innocent Canadians who share their stories of being "railroaded" by the RCMP in the same way we're told Sebastian and Atif were, and those glimpses into the hows and whys behind "Mr. Big" are compelling. But the combination of her bias toward her brother and the lack of access and cooperation she gained from the RCMP (which is understandable when we hear the phone conversation between Burns and the head of the task force; his concern may well be due to the fact that exposure would cost an undercover operation a great deal of effectiveness) leave this feeling a bit lopsided and incomplete. Worth a watch, yes, but we're not afforded nearly enough of a glimpse into this "shadow force" of the RCMP as we would need to make any concrete conclusions. Instead we get more about the Burns/Rafay case (again, understandable, since Ms. Burns had ready access and a vested interest in that area) than about the police unit at all.

If this documentary piques your interest about the case that started Tiffany on the trail, definitely seek out that "48 Hours" episode as well; without it, the viewer ends up lacking vital context that Tiffany was unable to fully bring to the table. Unfortunately it only sheds more light on her brother's case, not on the fascinating and frightening idea that the RCMP has a sub-group whose sole purpose is, to hear her tell it, wresting false confessions out of innocent people. There doesn't seem to be anything out there just yet that can take us further down THAT rabbit hole.

While it may not have been made to the standard of higher budget documentaries, it is successful in shedding light on the serious injustices caused by Mr. Big tactics. When all is said and done, I believe many people wrongly convicted by this method will be exonerated. However, it will come at the cost of decades of imprisonment for these people. If real justice was applied, those responsible for these injustices would be jailed themselves.

As much as the uniformed do not want to believe it, people DO make false confessions. A high percentage of exonerations involve convictions where there was a false confession and NO forensic evidence.

As Mr. Rafay put so eloquently in his recent interview with CBC's Fifth Estate program "I think they're very clever about that. The Mr. Big operation essentially makes you try to be as plausible as you can in your false confession and that plausibility is what convinces a juror or someone else that: 'oh it must be true, it must be true' despite all the countervailing evidence."