Can a police officer be held responsible for torturing a suspect in the course of their questioning?

[50] An officer’s duties and hence his or her responsibilities cannot be equated with instructions as to how those duties and responsibilities should be carried out. Police policies speak to the manner in which police should carry out their responsibilities, but do not define or limit those responsibilities. The distinction between an officer’s responsibilities and the manner in which those responsibilities are performed was made in Gauthier v. Brome Lake (Town), 1998 CanLII 788 (SCC), [1998] 2 S.C.R. 3. In Gauthier, two police officers had brutally tortured a suspect in the course of an interrogation. The suspect sued the town which under the relevant legislation was vicariously responsible for damage caused by the police officers “in the performance of work for which they are employed”. The Town contended that the officers were not performing “work for which they [were] employed” when they tortured the suspect: para. 38. Gonthier J. rejected this submission indicating at para. 93: There is no doubt that at the time they brutally beat the appellant, the respondents [the police officers] … were performing the duties for which they were employed: they were on duty and were conducting an interrogation in the course of a criminal investigation into allegations of theft of a safe [Emphasis added].