Brian H. Greenspan

The appellant appealed his conviction for sexual assault to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Court allowed the appeal and ordered a new trial, agreeing with the dissenting reasons of Houlden J.A. in the Court of Appeal, which found that the trial judge unintentionally misled the jury regarding assistance on questions of fact and that the Crown's address to the jury was not a fair and dispassionate presentation of its case.

The accused was charged with manslaughter following a consensual fist fight outside a bar.

The victim was knocked unconscious but the accused continued to strike him, resulting in the victim's death.

The trial judge acquitted the accused, finding the victim had consented to a fair fight.

The Court of Appeal set aside the acquittal and substituted a manslaughter conviction.

The Supreme Court of Canada dismissed the appeal, holding that public policy and common law principles limit the legal effectiveness of consent to assault.

Consent is vitiated between adults who intentionally apply force causing serious hurt or non-trivial bodily harm to each other in the course of a fist fight or brawl.

The appellant, after consuming alcohol, drove his vehicle into a hayride, killing four people and injuring a fifth.

At trial, he was acquitted of criminal negligence causing death and bodily harm, but convicted of dangerous driving, after the trial judge instructed the jury that criminal negligence required a subjective 'deliberate and wilful assumption of the risk'.

The Crown successfully appealed to the Court of Appeal, which ordered a new trial.

The Supreme Court of Canada dismissed the appellant's appeal, holding that the trial judge's instruction placed too high an onus on the Crown, though the Court split on whether the proper test for criminal negligence is purely objective or requires a minimal subjective intent.

The appellants were charged with conspiracy to defraud the government.

The Crown's case relied on wiretap evidence obtained from listening devices installed in the appellants' motor vehicles.

The trial judge excluded the evidence, finding that the motor vehicles should have been specifically described in the judicial authorizations since they were known targets.

The Court of Appeal reversed this decision, holding that the trial judge's ruling was an impermissible collateral attack on the authorization.

The Supreme Court of Canada dismissed the appeal, confirming that a motor vehicle is a 'place' under the Criminal Code and that the general description in the authorization was sufficient.

The Court also agreed that challenging the lack of specific description constituted a collateral attack.

The appellant was convicted of first degree murder.

The Court of Appeal found several errors of law in the trial judge's charge to the jury regarding the appellant's alibi, drunkenness, and identification evidence, but dismissed the appeal by applying the curative proviso in s. 613(1)(b)(iii) of the Criminal Code.

The appellant appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, arguing that the application of the proviso was an error of law.

The Supreme Court held that the application of the proviso always involves a question of law and is reviewable.

However, the Court concluded that the Court of Appeal correctly applied the proviso, as the verdict would necessarily have been the same even if the errors had not occurred, given the overwhelming evidence of guilt.

The appellant appealed a murder conviction arising from a fatal beating in which the victim died by suffocation after a fractured denture lodged in his throat.

The defence at trial was intoxication, and on appeal the appellant argued non-direction on the causal mechanism of death, failure to leave manslaughter apart from drunkenness, and misdirection on intoxication.

The majority held that, in light of the way the case was tried, the trial judge adequately instructed the jury on the intent requirement for murder and was not required to leave an unargued defence that the accused lacked knowledge apart from intoxication.

The majority also held that the intoxication instruction accorded with existing authority and declined to reconsider the governing law.

The appeal was dismissed, with a dissent that would have ordered a new trial.