[CHRON] A lawyer for Toronto's embattled mayor accused the city's top cop of acting as "judge, jury and executioner" Friday, a day after police said they had obtained a copy of a long-rumored video that appears to show Rob Ford puffing on a crack pipe.Ford's lawyer Dennis Morris attacked Police Chief Bill Blair for saying he was "disappointed" in the mayor at presser announcing the video had been recovered from a computer hard drive during an investigation of an associate of the mayor's suspected of providing him drugs.
"The chief said yesterday there is no evidence to charge him criminally in reference to this tape so what the heck?" Morris said. "He wasn't elected by the College of Cardinals and he shouldn't be pontificating."
Ford was elected mayor three years ago on a wave of discontent simmering in the city's outlying suburbs. Since then he has survived an attempt to remove him from office on conflict-of-interest charges and has frequently made news for his increasingly erratic behavior.
Allegations Ford had been caught on video smoking crack first surfaced in May. Two news hounds with the Toronto Star and one from the U.S. website Gawker said they saw the video but they did not obtain a copy.
Ford denied smoking crack and said at the time that the video did not exist. He also vilified the Toronto Star, accusing the paper of trying to take him down.
Morris called on police to release the video saying it likely shows the mayor smoking something other than crack.
"Let's see it," Morris said. "You can call it a crack pipe or a pipe to smoke a, b, c or d, so let's see it."