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Full-Text Articles in Law
Mr. Big And The New Common Law Confessions Rule: Five Years In Review, Adelina Iftene, Vanessa Kinnear
Mr. Big And The New Common Law Confessions Rule: Five Years In Review, Adelina Iftene, Vanessa Kinnear
Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press
The Supreme Court of Canada released its decision of R v Hart in July of 2014. The decision provided a two-prong framework for assessing the admissibility of confessions obtained through the undercover police tactic known as “Mr. Big”. The goal of the framework was to address reliability concerns, to protect suspects from state abuse, and to reduce the risk of wrongful convictions. The first prong of the test created a new common law evidentiary rule, under which Mr. Big obtained confessions are now presumptively inadmissible. The second prong revamped the existing abuse of process doctrine.
In this article, the authors …
Section 276 Misconstrued: The Failure To Properly Interpret And Apply Canada's Rape Shield Provisions, Elaine Craig
Section 276 Misconstrued: The Failure To Properly Interpret And Apply Canada's Rape Shield Provisions, Elaine Craig
Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press
Despite the vintage of Canada’s rape shield provisions (which in their current manifestation have been in force since 1992), some trial judges continue to misinterpret and/or misapply the Criminal Code provisions limiting the use of evidence of a sexual assault complainant’s other sexual activity. These errors seem to flow from a combination of factors including a general misunderstanding on the part of some trial judges as to what section 276 requires and a failure on the part of some trial judges to properly identify, and fully remove, problematic assumptions about sex and gender from their analytical approach to the use …