Dr. David Chiasson

The Minister of Justice referred the appellant's 1990 second-degree murder conviction to the Court of Appeal after it was discovered that police failed to disclose an audio recording of an interview with an alternate suspect.

The Crown conceded the non-disclosure constituted a miscarriage of justice, requiring the conviction to be quashed.

The appellant sought an acquittal, arguing a police conspiracy to frame him and that his confession was false.

The Court of Appeal declined to enter an acquittal, finding that a properly instructed jury could still convict based on the appellant's voluntary confession and new DNA evidence linking him to the victim's clothing.

The Court ordered a new trial rather than a judicial stay of proceedings.

The accused, charged with the first-degree murder of his daughter, brought a pre-trial application to exclude expert opinion evidence suggesting starvation as a possible cause of death.

The accused argued the Crown provided late notice of this theory and that the underlying estimates of the victim's pre-death weight lacked scientific validity.

The court dismissed the application, finding that late notice did not warrant exclusion given the time remaining before trial, and that the experts' estimates, based on specialized experience rather than strict scientific testing, met the threshold reliability required for admissibility.

The Crown appealed the accused's acquittal on a charge of second degree murder.

At trial, the accused advanced an alternate suspect defence and claimed the police investigation was inadequate.

The trial judge excluded the Crown's proposed rebuttal evidence from the alternate suspect, instructed the jury that they must acquit if they could not decide which of the two men committed the murder, and repeatedly warned the jury about wrongful convictions.

The Court of Appeal found that the trial judge erred in excluding the rebuttal evidence, in giving the co-principal instruction where there was evidence of joint participation, and in repeatedly referencing miscarriages of justice in the jury charge.

The cumulative effect of these errors warranted a new trial.