Carolyn Hackett

The offender was convicted of possession of property obtained by crime and money laundering after turning a blind eye to his spouse's $1 million fraud against her employer.

The Crown sought a three-year penitentiary sentence, while the defence sought two years.

Emphasizing denunciation and deterrence, the court sentenced the offender to 30 months' incarceration and imposed an $800,000 free-standing restitution order, joint and several with his spouse.

The accused was charged with possession of property over $5,000 obtained by crime and money laundering.

The charges arose from a fraud committed by the accused's wife against her employer, totalling over $1,000,000.

The fraudulently obtained funds were deposited into a joint account and used to purchase various assets, including vehicles, trailers, and home renovations.

The court found that the accused either had actual knowledge that the funds were obtained illegally or was wilfully blind to their origin, given numerous red flags such as his wife's prior fraud conviction, bad credit, and the sudden influx of unexplained wealth.

The accused was found guilty of both offences.

Karen Cady was found guilty of fraud and possession of forged documents.

The Crown applied for forfeiture of proceeds of crime and a fine in lieu of forfeiture.

The court ordered forfeiture of real property and a motor vehicle, but exercised its discretion under s. 462.41 of the Criminal Code to return a portion of the sale proceeds to innocent third-party secured creditors, Computershare Trust Company of Canada and TD Auto Finance (Canada) Inc., to satisfy their legitimate interests.

A fine in lieu of forfeiture of $928,063.61 was imposed on Cady for the remaining proceeds of crime, with an 8-year payment period and a 4-year default imprisonment term.

Karen Cady pleaded guilty to defrauding her employer, Henninger’s Diesel Ltd., of over $1 million and possessing a forged document.

This was her third fraud conviction, with previous offenses also involving employers.

The court considered aggravating factors including the breach of trust, magnitude and sophistication of the fraud, its duration, and the significant impact on the victim company and its employees.

Mitigating factors included her guilty plea.

The court emphasized denunciation and deterrence, imposing a four-year penitentiary term, a 10-year prohibition from positions of financial trust, a non-communication order, and a restitution order for the full amount of the loss.

This is a sentencing decision for Sakia Mojadiddi, who pleaded guilty to fraud over $5,000, defrauding 47 victims of over $1 million over a decade.

The fraud involved falsely promising refugee sponsorship through a charitable organization, exploiting vulnerable individuals and abusing a position of trust.

The Crown sought 4-4.5 years imprisonment, while the defence sought 3 years.

The court imposed a sentence of 3.5 years imprisonment, along with ancillary orders including a 10-year prohibition on managing others' property, restitution of $946,083.99, a fine in lieu of forfeiture of $1,077,584.00, a DNA order, and a non-communication order.

The court emphasized denunciation and general deterrence for large-scale frauds, finding the sentence proportionate to the gravity of the offence and the offender's blameworthiness, while also considering mitigating factors such as the guilty plea, age, and health, but not reducing the sentence further due to COVID-19 given measures in federal institutions.

Tarrique Gordon was convicted of sexual assault and sexual interference involving a 15-year-old.

The court addressed the constitutional invalidity of mandatory minimum sentences and applied the Kienapple principle to conditionally stay the sexual assault conviction, sentencing only for sexual interference.

The sentencing decision considered aggravating factors such as vaginal penetration, significant victim impact, and the offender's disregard for pleas to stop, alongside mitigating factors including the offender's youth, first-time offender status, family support, and rehabilitative potential.

The court also gave serious consideration to the collateral immigration consequences of a sentence exceeding six months, ultimately imposing a sentence of two years less a day imprisonment, along with various ancillary orders.

The defendant, R.P., was charged with sexual interference in relation to C.H., his wife's daughter, then aged ten.

The judge-alone trial focused on the credibility of C.H.'s testimony regarding an attempted sexual assault.

The court assessed C.H.'s credibility as a young witness, applying Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence on child evidence and victim reactions.

The mother's testimony, which sought to discredit C.H., was found not credible due to her motives and inconsistencies.

The court found C.H. to be a credible and reliable witness, noting her candidness and lack of embellishment.

R.P. was found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Crown applied to admit the accused's statement to police as voluntary.

The accused had asserted his right to silence, but the interviewing officer made two improper inducements: suggesting the accused might not be charged if he gave his side of the story, and stating that an early explanation would be more credible to a judge than a later one presented by a lawyer.

The court found these inducements to be false and a direct assault on the accused's right to silence.

Despite the Crown arguing that the statement was prompted by the presentation of Snapchats, the court concluded that the inducements were significant and contributed to the accused's decision to speak.

Consequently, the statement was ruled inadmissible as the Crown failed to prove its voluntariness beyond a reasonable doubt.

The defendant was charged with operating a motor vehicle with an excess blood alcohol concentration following a multi-vehicle collision.

The Crown alleged the defendant caused a chain-reaction rear-end collision involving four vehicles.

The central issue was whether the Crown had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was the driver of the vehicle involved in the collision.

The court found that while the defendant was present at the scene and possessed a key to the vehicle, the identification evidence was weak due to its generality, cross-racial nature, and discrepancies in the witness's description of the driver's age.

The court concluded that the evidence fell short of the requisite standard of proof and acquitted the defendant.

The Crown brought applications to admit two hearsay statements from the complainant, who was unavailable to testify.

The first was a 911 call reporting a knife incident; the second was a sworn, cautioned, videotaped KGB statement describing both a knife incident and a hammer incident.

The court admitted the 911 call under the res gestae exception but excluded the KGB statement for failure to meet the principled exception to the hearsay rule as refined in R. v. Bradshaw.

The court found that while the KGB statement had procedural safeguards, it lacked sufficient substantive reliability due to the declarant's memory problems, significant criminal record, and material contradictions with medical records.

The defendant was charged with operating a motor vehicle while impaired by a drug following a stop at a RIDE check.

The Crown sought to prove impairment through evidence of the defendant's observations at the roadside, standard field sobriety tests, a drug recognition evaluation, and toxicology results from a urine sample.

The defendant challenged the lawfulness of the SFST, DRE, and urine sample demands under the Charter.

The trial judge found reasonable suspicion for the SFST demand and reasonable and probable grounds for the DRE and urine sample demands.

However, the trial judge found that the Crown had not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant's ability to operate a motor vehicle was impaired by a drug, citing concerns about the subjectivity of the DRE examination, mixed results on physical tests, normal driving observations, and the limitations of urine testing in establishing impairment at the time of driving.

The offender pleaded guilty to sexual assault of a nine-year-old child on Christmas Day, 2013.

While in the living room of the victim's home, the offender grabbed the child's buttocks twice.

The victim was profoundly traumatized by the incident.

The Crown and defence jointly submitted to a sentence of 90 days' imprisonment to be served intermittently.

The court accepted the joint submission as proportionate to the gravity of the offence and the offender's degree of responsibility, and as appropriately calibrated to address sentencing objectives including deterrence, denunciation, and rehabilitation.

A young person in custody at the Roy McMurtry Youth Centre was charged with three counts of unlawfully using violence with intent to provoke fear in justice system participants to impede them in their duties, three counts of criminal harassment, and one count of mischief to property under $5,000.

The charges arose from an incident where the accused became aggressive and belligerent after being denied telephone access, shouted at staff, clenched his fists, approached staff members, and threw a telephone receiver against a wall.

The court found that the accused's conduct, while disruptive and inappropriate, did not constitute violence as legally defined, nor did it constitute threatening conduct designed to instill fear.

The court distinguished between disruptive institutional misconduct and criminal behaviour.

The accused was acquitted on all counts except mischief to property, for which he was convicted.