Criminal Law/Policy
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Someone’s Got to Do It
Was the Supreme Court right to change the law on the right to a speedy trial? In my last post, I summarized the Supreme Court’s decision in R. v. Jordan, 2016 SCC 27, in which the Court, by a 5-4 majority and over the vigorous disagreement of the concurrence, held that criminals prosecutions in which a… Continue reading
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Keeping Time, Time, Time
The Supreme Court changes the meaning of the right to be tried within a reasonable time A couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court issued a very important, and fairly radical, decision on the “right … to be tried within a reasonable time,” which paragraph 11(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms grants to “any… Continue reading
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Churchill on Prison
Winston Churchill’s thoughts on his time as a prisoner (of war) I’m not sure, and am too lazy to verify, whether if Winston Churchill is the only head of a Commonwealth government to have been a prisoner; but there cannot have been many. (UPDATE: As my friend Malcolm Lavoie points out to me, Nelson Mandela… Continue reading
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Expanding Hatred Again
Don’t expand the Criminal Code’s hate speech provisions. Repeal them! This morning, the federal government has introduced a new bill in Parliament, C-16, that would, if enacted, add “gender identity” and “gender expression” to the definition of “identifiable grounds” used in the advocacy of genocide and hate speech provisions of the Criminal Code. (It would… Continue reading
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Bullshit in Sentencing
An ostensibly minimalist, and an unsatisfactory, decision from the Supreme Court In R. v. Safarzadeh-Markhali, 2016 SCC 14, decided last month, the Supreme Court stuck down a provision of the Criminal Code that prevented sentencing judges from crediting more than the time the offender actually served in pre-trial detention against the sentence imposed when the offender had been… Continue reading
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Down with Hypocrisy, Again
Over at Democratic Audit UK, Mollie Gerver has an interesting post arguing that the European Union should decriminalize people smuggling ― that is, helping consenting individuals to cross borders which they lack permission to cross, in exchange for payment. (Consent is very important here: it’s what distinguishes “smuggling” from “trafficking,” the moving of people by force… Continue reading
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The Fog of Law
The Prime Minister has announced that, should his government return to power after the election, it will seek to enact legislation criminalizing the travel to some parts of the world, considered to be hotbeds of terrorism. Both the list of areas in question and the details of the legislation are sketchy at this point, so… Continue reading
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What Were They Smoking?
Last week, the Supreme Court held that the prohibition on medical marijuana products intended to be ingested or applied as creams ― as opposed to dried medical marijuana for the purposes of smoking, for which a permission can be granted ― is arbitrary and, therefore, not in accordance with principles of fundamental justice, in violation of s. 7 of the… Continue reading
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Help Us. Or Maybe Don’t?
Here’s another point that I found interesting in the Supreme Court’s decision in R. v. Tatton, 2015 SCC 33. (I wrote about Justice Moldaver’s comment regarding mandatory minimum sentences yesterday.) The issue in Tatton was whether self-induced intoxication could be invoked as a defence to a charge of arson ― but Justice Moldaver, writing for the… Continue reading
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Minimum Agreement
In R. v. Nur, 2015 SCC 15, Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the mandatory minimum sentence Parliament had imposed for the crime of possessing a restricted or a prohibited firearm, either loaded or with ammunition nearby, without the appropriate license. Justices Rothstein, Moldaver, and Wagner dissented, arguing that the majority’s approach to assessing the constitutionality of mandatory… Continue reading
Double Aspect 