scholarly journals Consent Searches for Electronic Text Communications: Escaping the Zero-Sum Trap

2018 ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Steven Penney
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
Electronic Text ◽  
Supreme Court Of Canada ◽  
Lower Court ◽  
Reasonable Expectation ◽  
Section 8 ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Oral Communications ◽  
Zero Sum

In R. v. Marakah, a majority of the Supreme Court of Canada decided that senders of electronic text communications maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy over their messages even after they are copied to recipients’ devices. The dissenters argued, in contrast, that any such expectation is objectively unreasonable given senders’ inability to control the messages after delivery. The Supreme Court did not settle the question, however, of whether this expectation can be defeated by a recipient’s voluntary decision to allow police to search his or her own device. Indeed, each side intimated that such a consent would be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain.This article argues, nonetheless, that courts can and should use consent doctrine to avoid the “zero-sum” model of section 8 adjudication that characterizes the majority and dissenting reasons in Marakah. Properly interpreted, that doctrine preserves Marakah’s core holding — that senders do not reasonably expect unfettered state access to their received text communications — while also giving effect to recipients’ autonomous decisions to assist police.However, as with oral communications, a recipient’s consent to disclose a sender’s text communications to police should only defeat the sender’s expectation of privacy over preexisting messages. Contrary to several lower court decisions, this article argues that the acquisition of future, incoming communications from recipients’ devices (with or without consent) invades senders’ reasonable expectations of privacy under section 8 of the Charter and constitutes an “interception” requiring judicial authorization under section 184.2 of the Criminal Code.

scholarly journals Ce qui est abusif au sens de l'article 8 de la Charte canadienne lors de la recherche de preuves

2005 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 965-982
Author(s):  
Bernard Auger
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Search And Seizure ◽  
Supreme Court Of Canada ◽  
Section 8 ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Liberal Approach ◽  
Compliance With The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right ◽  
Minimum Criteria

In determining whether legislation permitting search and seizure properly meets the requirements of section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the courts have been obliged to balance the right of the individual to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure with the right of the state to ensure compliance with the law. In Hunter v. Southam, the Supreme Court of Canada established the minimum criteria of reasonable search and seizure for the purposes of section 8. The liberal approach adopted by the Supreme Court raises an important question : Should the same criteria apply to administrative statutes empowering bodies to conduct inquiries and inspections ? The author compares section 8 of the Charter with the American 4th Amendment, examining the requirement for search warrants in the light of Canadian cases. He then examines and discusses the case law concerning the applicability of section 8 to statutory provisions relating to the production of documents and the standard of reasonableness that should apply to these situations.

scholarly journals R. V. SHARPE AND THE DEFENCE OF ARTISTIC MERIT

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1, 2 & 3) ◽  
pp. 2001
Author(s):  
June Ross
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Child Pornography ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
Supreme Court Of Canada ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
Judicial Decisions ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Artistic Merit ◽  
The Impact

The impact of judicial decisions is sometimes most significant and most controversial in relation to matters that were not at the forefront in the legal proceedings. The decision in R. v. Sharpe1 may be such a case. In this decision, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld, with minor qualifications, the offence of private possession of child pornography under section 163.1 of the Criminal Code.2 The case was argued and resolved largely as an issue of privacy — could the prohibition on child pornography extend to private possession, while remaining within constitutional limits?

scholarly journals Children in Pornography after Sharpe

2005 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janine Benedet
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Child Pornography ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
Supreme Court Of Canada ◽  
Canadian Charter ◽  
Constitutional Protection ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Definition Of

In its recent decision in R. v. Sharpe, the majority of the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the Criminal Code provisions prohibiting the possession and making of child pornography, subject to two exceptions. Despite a narrow construction of the definition of child pornography and a broad reading of the statutory defences, the majority found that prohibiting individuals from making and possessing some kinds of child pornography was an unjustifiable limit on the freedom of expression guaranteed by s. 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The dissent would have upheld the legislation in its entirety. This article argues that the majority of the Court erred in considering the value of freedom of expression in a detached and abstract manner. Operating in this abstract plane led the Court to approve two significant exceptions on the basis of hypothetical examples of overbreadth, without considering the reality of the exceptions as they relate to documented child pornography cases. As a result, the Court extended constitutional protection to some categories of material that are clearly harmful to children. This result should make us sceptical of the use in Charter cases of broad reading in remedies that create complex judicial amendments with unexamined consequences.

scholarly journals Self-Defence and Consent: The Use of Common Law Developments in Canadian Criminal Code Analysis

1994 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 484
Author(s):  
M. Anne Stalker
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
Supreme Court Of Canada ◽  
Code Analysis ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Canadian Criminal Code ◽  
The Common ◽  
Court Of Appeal ◽  
Self Defence

The author examines the interaction between the Criminal Code and the common law in relation to two areas of law recently handled by both the Alberta Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada

scholarly journals The Problematic Revival of Murder Under Section 229(c) of the Criminal Code

2010 ◽  
pp. 675 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kent Roach
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
Mens Rea ◽  
Supreme Court Of Canada ◽  
Important Requirement ◽  
Trial Judges ◽  
The Supreme Court

This article examines the increased use of the murder offence under s. 229(c) of the Criminal Code/. It outlines how the objective foresight of death arm of s. 229(c) was struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Martineau, but still has not been repealed by Parliament. Three unfortunate cases are examined where trial judges erred by leaving the jury a copy of s. 229(c) with its unconstitutional objective arm present. The article examines the pre-Charter jurisprudence on s. 229(c) and suggests that the requirement that the accused have an unlawful object that is distinct from the actions that led to the death of the victim is still an important requirement. It then focuses on the second and most important mens rea requirement of s. 229(c), namely the requirement that the accused know that death was likely to occur. This fault requirement is examined and contrasted with recklessness and objective foresight of death, both of which are not constitutionally sufficient for a murder conviction. It is argued that some recent cases have treated accidental deaths during the pursuit of an unlawful object as murder under s. 229(c) and that such a result violates s. 7 of the Charter, including principles of fundamental justice that accidental deaths not be punished as murder and that unintentional harms not be punished as severely as intentional harms.

scholarly journals Declarations of Invalidity in Superior Courts

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Mancini
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
Short Paper ◽  
Lower Court ◽  
Stare Decisis ◽  
Binding Effect ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Lower Courts ◽  
The Law

Section 52(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982 empowers courts to declare unconstitutional laws that are inconsistent with the Constitution “to the extent of their inconsistency.”1 Section 52 is a powerful tool in the hands of judges. For example, a claimant need not be directly affected by an unconstitutional law to raise a challenge to that same law,2 and once a court declares a law invalid under section 52, the law is effectively removed from the statute books.3 A key question is whether such a declaration, issued by one judge of a multi-member lower court, binds another judge of that same court. This phenomenon can be broadly described as “horizontal stare decisis.”4 But the Supreme Court has only explored horizontal stare decisis in the context of revisiting its own decisions.5 It has never opined on whether there is something special about horizontal stare decisis in lower courts, especially involving constitutional declarations under section 52; specifically, whether one judge is bound by another judge’s declaration of invalidity. This issue was directly confronted in the McCaw case at the Ontario Superior Court.6 Faced with a previous section 52 declaration of invalidity issued against section 33.1 of the Criminal Code, Spies J found that she was bound by that declaration. Accordingly, she found section 33.1 unconstitutional. In this short paper, after reviewing the salient facts of McCaw, I argue that Spies J’s ruling is broadly consistent with Supreme Court constitutional remedies doctrine, which is basically formalist in nature and permits no discretion on the part of judges to depart from the binding effect of a s.52 remedy. I then deal with two objections to this position. Ultimately, while one can question the coherence of the Supreme Court’s doctrine, McCaw represents a defensible application of it.

scholarly journals Tessling, Brown, and A.M.: Towards a Principled Approach to Section 8

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
William MacKinnon
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Search And Seizure ◽  
Reasonable Expectation ◽  
Section 8 ◽  
Individual Privacy ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Reasonable Expectation Of Privacy

This article analyzes the Supreme Court of Canada's search-and-seizure jurisprudence in anticipation of the Court's forthcoming decisions on the admissibility of evidence obtained by police dog searches in Brown and A.M. After reviewing the historical development of s. 8, the author then goes on to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the Court's analysis of sense-enhancing aids and the reasonable expectation of privacy' in Tessling. The article ultimately argues that the Court ought to eschew a case-by-case model for establishing the existence of areasonable expectation of privacy, and go beyond the facts of Brown and A.M. in order to adopt a more principled approach to s. 8. The author maintains that a more principled approach is necessary because stale actors need clearer guidance if they are to successfully balance individual privacy with the use of sense enhancing aids.

scholarly journals Come on Mann Don’t Search Me! A Case Comment on R. v. C.J.F.

2009 ◽  
pp. 277-284
Author(s):  
Michael A. Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
Supreme Court Of Canada ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Youth Justice ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Corrosive Effect ◽  
The Right ◽  
Peace Officer ◽  
State Interference

In Mann the Supreme Court of Canada confirmed that the police have the power to detain individuals, albeit briefly, for investigative purposes. The Court also supplemented this power with the power to conduct protective searches incident to these investigative detentions (PSIIDs). While the Court made it clear that the power to conduct these searches was not incident to every investigative detention, this power should, nevertheless, be regarded dubiously. The conditions required to conduct a PSIID are lower than those required for a peace officer to make an arrest without a warrant under s. 495 of the Criminal Code for violations of ss. 884 or 905 of the Code. Allowing the police to wield both of these weapons against “crime” augments police power to engage in warrantless searches, and concomitantly decreases individual rights. The recent decision of the Saskatchewan Provincial Court, Youth Justice Court, in C.J.F., illustrates the corrosive effect that Mann and its PSIIDs can have “on the right of individuals to walk the streets free from state interference.” C.J.F. challenges us to ensure that Mann is being properly applied, but it also challenges us to understand the effect of having PSIIDs.

scholarly journals Les ordonnances de dédommagement et de restitution en droit pénal canadien

2005 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 603-623
Author(s):  
Jacques Gagné
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Attorney General ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
Supreme Court Of Canada ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Victims Of Crime ◽  
Legislative Changes ◽  
Court Of Appeal ◽  
Limited Scope

This paper examines the constitutional law issue raised before the Supreme Court of Canada in the case of R. v. Anne Zelensky and the T. Eaton Co. Ltd. and the Attorney General of Canada, decided on May 1, 1978. Having discussed the judgment of the Manitoba Court of Appeal, the author proceeds to support the majority decision of the Supreme Court, as expressed by the Chief Justice, viz. that the provision for compensation orders in subsection 653(1) of the Criminal Code is intra vires the federal Parliament as part of the sentencing process. The paper then proceeds to draw a comparison between compensation orders under subsection 653(1) and probation orders under paragraph 663(2) e) of the same Code. Differences in the nature of these two classes of orders are brought out. In view of the limited scope for application of subsection 653(1) the author suggests a number of legislative changes. These changes would remove all the constitutional difficulties inherent in the present drafting of the subsection. They would also fashion a more efficient instrument for compensating victims of crime, while preserving the original purpose of rehabilitating the offender.

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