Wednesday, September 14, 2022

Attempting to have possession of a controlled drug

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If legislation [1]   has omitted to provide for an offence of procuring a controlled drug for supply, and so also omitted an offence of att...
Thursday, September 08, 2022

The principle underlying judicial recognition of retrospective removal of a defence: Stephens v The Queen [2022] HCA 31

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If the legislature changes the law by removing a defence, and that change is not specified to apply to trials that have commenced and not be...
Wednesday, August 24, 2022

Identifying unlawful benefit

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Calculating a person’s unlawfully obtained benefit from criminal activity can raise some complicated issues. Suppose a lotto ticket has been...
Wednesday, August 10, 2022

How much of the work should a final appeal court do? Two remittal and retrial decisions of the High Court of Australia.

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Sometimes one wonders why an ultimate appeal court orders new trials or refers issues back to lower courts. Why not decide cases finally, si...
Sunday, July 31, 2022

Arbitrary detention, right to legal advice, a 5-4 split on final appeal: R v Lafrance, 2022 SCC 32

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The first thing that strikes one on reading R v Lafrance , 2022 SCC 32 (22 July 2022), is that the Supreme Court of Canada was divided 5-4....
Thursday, July 07, 2022

Truth-seeking? R v J.J., 2022 SCC 28

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I don’t know how well the person who determines the wording of Canada’s federal laws speaks English. Look at this: “(3) The judge shall, as ...
Thursday, June 02, 2022

Prosecutor's fallacy and conditional probability reasoning: R v Lyttle [2022] NZCA 52

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The prosecutor’s fallacy is an error in reasoning that can be very difficult to notice. It came to attention recently in what is now our lea...
Wednesday, May 18, 2022

Overruling "final" decisions: Chandler v The State (Trinidad and Tobago) No 2) [2022] UKPC 19

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You can’t read Chandler v The State (Trinidad and Tobago) (No 2) [2022] UKPC 19 without thinking of the anticipated overruling by the Suprem...
Sunday, May 15, 2022

Judicial responses to rights-infringing legislation: Brown v R, 2022 SCC 18

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In Brown v R , 2022 SCC 18 (May 13, 2022) the Supreme Court of Canada declared  unconstitutional, and of no force or effect, s 33.1 of the...
Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Unfair trial or not unfair trial? Hewey v R (Bermuda) [2022] UKPC 12

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Was the trial that was the subject of the appeal in Hewey v R (Bermuda) [2022] UKPC 12   unfair? The judge’s summing up to the jury had not ...
Friday, April 22, 2022

A lawful but contextually unreasonable search: R v Tim, 2022 SCC 12

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For an example of circumstances where a lawful search was in breach of the defendant’s right not to be unreasonably searched, see R v Tim , ...
Monday, April 18, 2022

Political laughter at law: extradition, risk of torture and trial unfairness, and Minister of Justice v Kim [2022] NZSC 44

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I must admit that I had a good laugh at the brilliant cartoon by the gifted Sharon Murdoch, published yesterday in Stuff (see the cartoon da...
Wednesday, April 13, 2022

Proximity and fishing in safety searches upon arrest: R v Stairs, 2022 SCC 11

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Attempts to codify the law - that is, to capture the whole of the law on a given subject in a statute so that it is not necessary to refer t...
Saturday, April 09, 2022

Witness credibility, absence of cross-examination, and trial fairness: R v Samaniego, 2022 SCC 9

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Reading R v Samaniego, 2022 SCC 9 (March 25, 2022), and its excellent summary by Henna Mohan at thecourt.ca , might leave you wondering a...