Jack Hardy

The offender pleaded guilty to two counts of dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing bodily harm and one count of simple assault.

After crashing his vehicle into a gate at high speed, injuring two passengers, the offender panicked, moved a passenger with a broken back against his wishes, and attempted to hide from a passing motorist.

The court weighed the serious aggravating factors of his post-accident conduct against his youthful first-offender status, strong community support, and positive pre-sentence report.

The court imposed a suspended sentence with two years of probation and a two-year driving prohibition.

The applicant, Dominic Mazza, charged with possession for the purpose of trafficking cocaine, brought an application to exclude evidence of cocaine found in his vehicle.

He argued his arrest was unlawful, the subsequent search of his vehicle was unlawful, and his Charter right to counsel was violated by its suspension and subsequent denial.

The court found that the police lacked reasonable and probable grounds for arrest, rendering the arrest and incidental search unlawful.

The court also found that the initial suspension of the right to counsel was unjustified, and the subsequent failure to facilitate counsel after the suspension was lifted constituted a further violation.

Applying the R. v. Grant factors, the court determined that the seriousness of the Charter-infringing conduct and the impact on the accused's rights outweighed society's interest in adjudication on the merits, leading to the exclusion of the cocaine evidence.

The accused brought a Charter application challenging a residential search conducted under a s. 11 CDSA warrant in a prosecution for cocaine trafficking and marijuana possession.

The court held that, although the information to obtain suggested possible drug dealing, it failed to establish reasonable grounds to believe the residence contained evidence or contraband, relying instead on unsupported conclusory assertions and generalized propensity reasoning.

The search of the residence therefore violated s. 8 of the Charter.

Applying the Grant framework, the court found the breach significant, the privacy impact serious, and excluded the evidence seized from inside and in the backyard of the residence under s. 24(2).

The Crown appealed an acquittal on a charge of operating a motor vehicle while impaired by a drug contrary to s. 253(1)(a) of the Criminal Code.

The trial judge had excluded both lay opinion evidence and expert evidence from police officers trained as Drug Recognition Experts (DREs), as well as a toxicology report, concluding that such evidence was inadmissible or failed to meet the Mohan criteria for expert evidence.

The appeal court held that lay witnesses, including police officers, may provide opinion evidence about impairment, and that trained DRE officers may give expert opinion evidence concerning drug impairment.

The court found that the trial judge erred in law by excluding the officers’ expert evidence and failing to consider the toxicology report.

As a result, the acquittal was set aside and a new trial was ordered.