Jailed former Mountie suing Ontario Ministry of Corrections

A former RCMP officer, who has been incarcerated multiple times for a multitude of serious weapons-related offences, is suing the Ontario government’s Ministry Of Community Safety and Correctional Services for what he says are several human rights violations against him.

David Kift has served time at several correctional facilities, including Joyceville Institution and Quinte Detention Centre, and alleges in his lawsuit that he has been denied medical treatment and has spent much of his incarceration in “protective custody” which, he says, amounts to solitary confinement.

Kift, who suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after having seen a colleague die in the line of duty, claims that while incarcerated he has been repeatedly denied access to necessary anti-depressant medication which had been prescribed to treat his illness.

He also alleges that he was placed in “protective custody” for much of his time in incarceration as a result of his untreated disability, a 16-month period of time which he says was comparable in many respects to solitary confinement.

In the lawsuit, Kift claims he was also denied access to a psychiatrist for a protracted period of time, seldom received clean linen, was regularly denied access to a phone or reading material, and was left in unsanitary cell conditions.

Kift, who gained widespread notoriety when he wrote the tell-all memoir “The Naked Mountie”, served on the RCMP for nearly 2 decades but was most recently sentenced in 2014 to nearly 8 years in prison after a raid on his Eels Lake home in 2013 found a huge cache of restricted weapons, including land mines, grenades, machine guns, crossbows, a cannon, and many firearms which had their serial numbers removed.

The police officer-turned-gunrunner with ties to organized crime had also been previously convicted of 10 weapons charges in 2003, and then again of transporting illegal weapons in 2008, and was sentenced to a 5 year prison term at that time.

Kift’s case is scheduled to be heard in Kingston on February 7th and 8th, 2019.