The docket
Each brief sets out the offence, its elements, the procedural history, the law and an analysis, with citations you can check.
A judge told jurors there was no consent in law unless the complainant communicated it by words or conduct. That is not the law for the act of sexual assault. Combined with a Crown closing that said the accused had every reason to lie, the conviction could not stand.
A divided court holds that telling a noncitizen she can stay in the country, when the plea in fact makes removal mandatory, is constitutionally deficient advice, and that corroborated testimony plus a plausible trial defense can show prejudice even without contemporaneous evidence.
The accused argued the trial judge mishandled a witness who needed special caution, that new bail documents showed a motive to lie, and that the verdict was unreasonable. The court rejected all three, and left open whether the Vetrovec caution applies in sexual offence cases at all.
Because the formal order was never issued, the court still had power to reopen. It declined: the delay was largely unexplained, the proposed fresh evidence was not truly fresh, and nothing suggested a miscarriage of justice.
Twenty-four years after a jury convicted Jennifer Gaskin of manslaughter in the death of her newborn son, fresh expert reports undermined the pathology evidence that shaking caused the death. With the Crown's consent, the court found the conviction unsustainable because of flawed pathological evidence, set it aside, entered an acquittal and called her the victim of a miscarriage of justice.
Scotland's appeal court held that excluding a message and alleged jokes caused no miscarriage of justice. The defence had sought that evidence only to explain a remark the appellant made in his own call to the emergency services, and his own trial evidence gave a different explanation for it.
The High Court of Justiciary refused an appeal against a conviction for attempting to murder a baby. It held that the expert's evidence did not go beyond her expertise in any way that caused a miscarriage of justice, that the prosecutor was entitled to rely on the appellant's delayed and shifting accounts, and that the trial judge's review of complex medical evidence was fair.
Matthew Berg argued the trial judge rejected his evidence simply because he believed the complainant. The Supreme Court of Canada found no error on these facts, but used the case to say that a conviction can never rest only on accepting the complainant's account.
When the Crown opened the door to evidence the trial judge had excluded, the judge had to revisit her ruling on her own initiative. A jury instruction and a yes or no question in re-examination did not restore a fair trial.
A seven judge majority held the trial judge should have kept Awale Hussein's youth findings and violent convictions from the jury. Yet the evidence on identity and intent was so strong that the Court applied the curative proviso and dismissed the appeal.
A babysitter pleaded guilty to criminal negligence causing a toddler's death without being told that peer reviewers had found the pathologist's opinions unreasonable. The Court of Appeal quashed the conviction but only stayed the charge. The Supreme Court replaced the stay with an acquittal, splitting five to four on why.
The Crown refused a judge-alone trial that would have finished on time. The Supreme Court held that the old "transitional" excuse for delay no longer applied, set aside the jury's verdicts and stayed the prosecution for breach of the right to be tried within a reasonable time.
Undisclosed police records, a witness's requests for a deal and medical records had to be weighed together, not one by one. Taken together they undermined confidence in a capital murder verdict, so a new trial was required.
The Crown told the jury Leighton Hay shaved off his dreadlocks after a nightclub shooting. Nobody tested the hair at trial. Years later, forensic experts found the clippings came mainly from his face, and the Supreme Court of Canada admitted that evidence and set aside the convictions.
The Board admitted scientific evidence that could have been obtained before trial, found the verdicts unsafe, refused to apply the proviso, and ordered a retrial rather than deciding the expert disputes itself.