Ashley Audet

The offender was convicted of trafficking in cocaine and conspiracy to traffic in cocaine.

He acted as upper management in a commercial cocaine trafficking conspiracy that purchased cocaine at the kilogram level and sold it at the quarter-kilogram level and below.

The Crown sought 4-5 years imprisonment, while the defence sought a conditional sentence of two years less a day.

The court found that a conditional sentence was inappropriate given the scale of the operation and the need for denunciation and deterrence.

The offender was sentenced to 3 years in the penitentiary for conspiracy and 2.5 years concurrent for trafficking.

The accused was charged with sexual services offences and uttering threats.

After the Crown withdrew a sexual assault charge, the accused argued that the rape shield provisions under s. 276 of the Criminal Code no longer applied to his proposed cross-examination of the complainant regarding her prior sex trade work.

The Crown and the complainant argued that s. 276 or the common law Seaboyer regime should apply.

The court held that s. 276 does not apply to sexual services offences unless there is a connection to a listed offence, which was absent here.

The court also declined to extend the Seaboyer common law regime, ruling that the trial judge is best suited to exercise a gatekeeping role over the proposed cross-examination.

The accused was charged with trafficking cocaine and conspiracy to traffic cocaine.

The Crown's case relied on intercepted communications, police surveillance, two cocaine seizures, and expert evidence on drug terminology.

The court found that the intercepted communications, which heavily featured drug slang, established beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused was part of an ongoing buy-sell conspiracy to traffic cocaine from the Greater Toronto Area to Sudbury.

The accused was convicted on both counts.

The accused was charged with possession of heroin for the purpose of trafficking after police found 19.07 grams of heroin in a safe inside an apartment he frequented.

The accused testified that he had obtained the safe for a friend to secure her belongings and did not know it contained heroin.

The friend testified and corroborated his account, admitting the heroin was hers.

Applying the W.(D.) framework, the court found the defence witnesses credible and their explanations reasonable, raising a reasonable doubt as to the accused's knowledge and possession of the drugs.

The accused was found not guilty.

The accused was arrested without a warrant for drug trafficking following a confidential informant tip and several days of police surveillance.

Searches incident to arrest, including a strip search at the police station, yielded a loaded handgun, cash, and drugs.

The accused brought a Charter application alleging violations of his ss. 8 and 9 rights, arguing the police lacked reasonable grounds for the arrest.

The court dismissed the application, finding that the totality of the circumstances, including the corroborated tip and surveillance observations, provided objectively reasonable grounds for the arrest and subsequent searches.

The applicant, charged in 2013 with a 1976 murder, brought a motion for a stay of proceedings due to lost evidence.

The lost evidence included the notes of thirteen police officers, an audiotaped confession by a third-party suspect, a videotaped recantation by that suspect, and various occurrence reports.

The court found that the deliberate destruction of police notes and the unexplained loss of the recordings constituted unacceptable negligence, breaching the applicant's section 7 Charter rights.

Concluding that the cumulative prejudice irreparably harmed the applicant's ability to make full answer and defence, the court granted a stay of proceedings.

In a prosecution for first degree murder, the Crown brought an application seeking admission of several out-of-court statements made by the deceased to friends and associates describing a deteriorating relationship with the accused and expressing fear that the accused and his family intended to kill him.

The court conducted a voir dire on the admissibility of the statements under the hearsay rule.

The court held that the statement expressing fear that the accused would kill the deceased with his own guns was admissible under the traditional state of mind exception to the hearsay rule.

The remaining statements describing prior disputes, business dealings, and a recent altercation between the deceased and the accused were admitted under the principled exception because necessity was established and sufficient indicia of reliability existed through corroborating evidence and contextual circumstances.

The probative value of the evidence relating to animus and motive outweighed any prejudicial effect, including concerns about prior discreditable conduct.

The accused, a Black man charged with the murder of an Asian man, brought a motion to allow multiple-choice questions to be put to prospective jurors during the challenge for cause process, arguing the standard Parks question is insufficient to uncover subconscious racial bias.

The Crown opposed the motion, arguing there was no evidentiary basis to depart from the standard question.

The court dismissed the motion, finding no evidence that the proposed multiple-choice format would be an improvement over the standard Parks question, but directed that jurors be instructed they may provide detailed answers rather than just 'yes' or 'no'.

The Crown sought a ruling that an accused’s inculpatory statement made to a police officer while awaiting medical treatment was voluntary and admissible.

The statement was made after the accused had earlier invoked the right to silence during a recorded interview and after consulting counsel.

The defence argued the statement was involuntary and obtained in breach of ss. 7 and 10(b) of the Charter, emphasizing gaps in the officer’s notes and inconsistencies in recollection.

The court applied the contextual voluntariness analysis and concluded that uncertainties about the unrecorded portions of the conversation and the officer’s unreliable recollection raised a reasonable doubt about voluntariness.

The statement was ruled inadmissible and the Charter exclusion argument became moot.