Aditi Venkatraman Iyer

The appellant appealed his convictions for sexual assault, criminal harassment, and breach of recognizance, as well as his sentence.

The primary ground of appeal was that the trial judge erred in dismissing his section 11(b) Charter application for unreasonable delay.

The Court of Appeal upheld the trial judge's finding that the 20-month net delay was justified by the exceptional circumstance of case complexity, given the 10 complainants, multiple charges, and extensive pre-trial applications.

The Court also dismissed the conviction appeals based on alleged misapprehension of evidence and unreasonable verdict.

The sentence appeal, challenging a four-month term for breach of recognizance and a 20-year SOIRA registration order, was also dismissed.

On extensive pre-trial motions in a first degree murder prosecution, the court addressed Charter challenges arising from a related arrest investigation, lost evidence, and multiple Garofoli applications to successive warrants and production orders.

The court found numerous serious breaches, including unlawful phone pinging, failures under ss. 10(a) and 10(b), unlawful seizure and reporting failures concerning cell phones, and unacceptable negligence in the loss of both bullpen video and a physically seized phone, leading to exclusion of all post-arrest statements, utterances, the seized phones, and extraction reports.

The court also found unacceptable negligence in the loss of the deceased's Corvette, but held that the proportionate remedy was a jury instruction rather than exclusion of the Van Dam evidence.

The Garofoli challenges largely failed because, after excision and amplification, the issuing justice could still have granted the contested authorizations, save for the phone-content search tied to the unlawfully obtained phones.

The appellants, Shawn Cargioli, Kendell Kamal, and Famien Morrisson, appealed their murder convictions stemming from the stabbing death of Shadi Taleb during a planned robbery.

Cargioli was convicted of first-degree murder, while Kamal and Morrisson were convicted of second-degree murder.

The appeals raised various grounds, including the admissibility of expert evidence, trial judge's rulings on witness testimony, admissibility of police statements, jury instructions on after-the-fact conduct, misapprehension of evidence, the co-conspirator's exception to the hearsay rule, and jury instructions on liability for manslaughter, murder, and first-degree murder.

The Court of Appeal dismissed the appeals of Morrisson and Kamal, affirming their convictions and sentences.

For Cargioli, the court found a reversible error in the first-degree murder instruction regarding the contemporaneity of mens rea and actus reus for active participation.

Given the Crown's concession, the court substituted a conviction for second-degree murder for Cargioli and remitted the matter for sentencing.

The accused was arrested for drug trafficking after police observed a hand-to-hand transaction.

During the arrest and subsequent booking, the accused was subjected to multiple searches, including a frisk search and an authorized strip search.

The accused brought a Charter application alleging breaches of his rights under ss. 7, 8, 9, and 10(b), arguing unlawful arrest, improper strip searches in the field and at the station, and a delay in implementing his right to counsel.

The court dismissed all Charter applications, finding the arrest lawful, the field and booking searches to be valid frisk searches rather than strip searches, the authorized strip search justified, and no deliberate delay in providing access to counsel.

The accused was found guilty of trafficking, possession for the purpose of trafficking, and breaching a release order.