this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
56 points (98.3% liked)

Canada

7187 readers
398 users here now

What's going on Canada?

Communities

🍁 Meta

🗺️ Provinces / Territories

🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Football (CFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer

💻 Universities

💵 Finance / Shopping

🗣️ Politics

🍁 Social and Culture

Rules

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:

https://lemmy.ca/

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
56
Long delays and collapsed cases are eroding faith in the justice system, lawyers warn (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
11 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Two and a half years after Norman Tate's son was killed in a car accident, he's still struggling to come to terms with how the justice system handled the aftermath.

"If you step forward inside that place, you're flipping a coin — whether you're going to get justice that day or not," he said on April 30, standing outside the Ontario Court of Justice in Brantford, Ont.

Norman Tate Junior was killed in a head-on collision a week before Christmas in 2021. The driver in the other car eventually was charged with impaired driving causing death and bodily harm. But the case crawled through the court system and was stayed after it breached the time limits for trials set in a 2016 Supreme Court decision.

That decision in R. v. Jordan established that criminal cases that go beyond those time limits — 18 months for provincial courts and 30 months for superior courts — can be stayed for unreasonable delay.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Two and a half years after Norman Tate's son was killed in a car accident, he's still struggling to come to terms with how the justice system handled the aftermath.

In an interview with CBC News, retired Supreme Court justice Richard Chartier said complicated cases can slow down judges as well.

In his interview with The House, Virani also cited increased federal funding for legal aid and said he expects provinces to step up — because people who can't afford lawyers tend to slow things down.

The large number of cases that collapse due to long delays is causing people to lose faith in the justice system, said Ivanna Iwasykiw, a lawyer who represents victims of sexual assault and abuse.

Michael Spratt, a criminal defence lawyer in Ottawa, said delays might affect whether a person pleads guilty or not, regardless of their guilt or innocence.

Conditions are so bad in some jails, Spratt said, that innocent people may plead guilty to avoid spending months in pre-trial detention.

The original article contains 1,482 words, the summary contains 160 words. Saved 89%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!