Andrew Hotke

The youth appellant was convicted of manslaughter following a group assault.

At trial, the judge disbelieved the appellant's exculpatory testimony and concluded he had fabricated his account to deflect blame, using this disbelief as circumstantial evidence of guilt.

On appeal, the Court of Appeal found the trial judge erred by failing to identify independent evidence of fabrication before using the disbelieved testimony as circumstantial evidence of guilt, contrary to the framework in R. v. Iqbal.

The appeal was allowed and a new trial ordered.

The applicant sought release pending appeal from manslaughter conviction and sentence.

The court accepted the appeal was not frivolous, surrender and safety concerns were manageable, and public confidence favored review before immediate enforcement in the circumstances.

Release pending appeal was ordered on agreed terms.

The applicant sought release pending appeal from convictions and an eight-year sentence for sexual offences.

The court accepted that the appeal was not frivolous and that attendance and safety concerns were manageable, and then found the grounds clearly surpassed the non-frivolous threshold when balancing enforceability and reviewability in the public-interest analysis.

Release pending appeal was granted.

On a criminal appeal as of right, the central issue was whether a handgun found in the appellant’s car met the Criminal Code definition of “firearm” under s. 2.

The trial judge had acquitted on several firearms counts after concluding operability required special expertise, considerable time, and parts not readily available.

The appellate court set aside acquittals, entered convictions on two firearms offences, and ordered a new trial on remaining firearms counts.

The Court held the handgun was a firearm and substantially agreed with the appellate reasons, including that the trial judge failed to assess all evidence on the ultimate issue of guilt or innocence.

The appeal was dismissed and the convictions and new trial order were upheld.

The appellant was convicted of robbery following a home invasion and sentenced to four years' imprisonment.

On appeal, he argued the trial judge erred by relying on the rejected testimony of a co-accused and failing to caution himself about unsavoury witness evidence.

He also sought to introduce fresh DNA evidence and appealed his sentence based on the parity principle.

The Court of Appeal dismissed the appeals and the fresh evidence motion, finding no error in the trial judge's assessment of the circumstantial evidence or the differing sentences imposed on the co-accused based on their respective moral culpability.

The appellant, an 18-year-old Indigenous man, shot and killed his father and best friend, and attempted to kill his father's girlfriend while highly intoxicated.

Following a trial, he was convicted of two counts of second degree murder and one count of attempted murder.

The trial judge accepted a joint recommendation from counsel and imposed concurrent life sentences with an 18-year parole ineligibility period.

On appeal, the Court of Appeal dismissed the conviction appeal but allowed the sentence appeal.

The Court held that the stringent Anthony-Cook test for departing from joint submissions does not apply to joint recommendations made after a contested trial.

Finding the 18-year period demonstrably unfit due to the trial judge's failure to properly weigh the appellant's youth, intoxication, immediate remorse, and the systemic impacts of colonization, the Court reduced the parole ineligibility period to 13 years.

The appellant appealed his conviction for second-degree murder of his intimate partner, arguing he lacked the capacity to form the requisite intent due to a cocaine-induced psychosis.

The trial judge rejected the defence psychiatric expert's opinion, finding it lacked objectivity and was inconsistent with the appellant's purposeful actions before, during, and after the shooting.

The Court of Appeal found no reversible error in the trial judge's assessment of the expert evidence and dismissed the appeal.

The appellant was charged with manslaughter and firearms offences in December 2015.

Trial was scheduled within the Jordan ceiling but delays arose when the Crown refused to consent to a judge-alone trial, causing the net delay to reach approximately 35 months, exceeding the 30-month ceiling.

The trial judge denied a stay of proceedings by applying a transitional exceptional circumstance, finding the parties had reasonably relied on pre-Jordan law.

The Supreme Court held that no transitional exceptional circumstance applied: after Jordan was decided in July 2016, the parties could not have reasonably relied on the prior state of the law, and the delay was attributable to the Crown's refusal to adapt rather than insufficient time for the system to do so.

The Court also rejected a bright-line rule that would characterize all delay following defence counsel's rejection of a court-offered date as defence delay.

The Attorney General for Ontario applied ex parte for certiorari with mandamus to quash a Justice of the Peace's refusal to issue a production order against textPlus, Inc., a US-based company with a virtual presence in Canada.

The Superior Court found that the Justice of the Peace committed jurisdictional errors and errors of law by concluding that the order could not be enforced and by failing to follow binding horizontal precedent regarding virtual presence.

The Court granted the application, quashed the refusal, and compelled the Ontario Court of Justice to issue the production order.

The applicant sought judicial review in the form of certiorari to quash an order granting the Crown access to her youth records.

The Crown sought the records because the applicant was proposed as a surety for an adult accused in a serious criminal matter.

The reviewing court found that the application justice, who had previously presided over the adult accused's preliminary inquiry, denied the applicant natural justice by relying on his own assessment of the strength of the Crown's case from that inquiry without giving the applicant notice or an opportunity to make submissions.

The court quashed the order, concluding that the result would not necessarily have been the same had a fair hearing been afforded.

The accused appealed convictions for firearms and drug trafficking offences, challenging production orders used to obtain historical text messages from a telecommunications provider.

The Court held the accused had standing under s. 8 of the Charter because he had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the electronic conversation records.

The majority concluded that seizure of already sent and received messages from provider storage was lawfully authorized by the production order regime and did not require a Part VI wiretap authorization.

A dissent would have treated acquisition of those messages as requiring Part VI authorization and would have excluded the evidence under s. 24(2).

The Court allowed the accused’s appeal and held that, on the totality of circumstances, he had a reasonable expectation of privacy in text messages recovered from the recipient’s phone, giving him standing to challenge the search under section 8.

With standing conceded, the warrantless search was unreasonable, and the text-message evidence was excluded under section 24(2) because admission would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.

Without that evidence the convictions could not stand, and the curative proviso did not apply.