J. Tatum

During a trial for child pornography offences, the accused brought a mistrial application after the Crown introduced an unannounced in-court demonstration by a police technical analyst to rebut evidence elicited during the cross-examination of the Crown's computer forensics expert.

The accused argued the analyst gave unqualified expert evidence and the demonstration constituted trial by ambush.

The court held that the analyst's testimony was factual, not expert opinion, but ruled the demonstration inadmissible due to the lack of prior disclosure.

The mistrial application was dismissed, with the court finding that excluding the demonstration and allowing the defence to recall witnesses or call their own expert was a sufficient remedy.

The appellant appealed his convictions for threatening death, criminal harassment, and mischief, as well as his suspended sentence and 12 months' probation.

The convictions arose from an incident where the appellant, after receiving a noise complaint, banged on neighbors' doors and threatened to kill them.

The appellant argued the trial judge misapprehended evidence, specifically an iPhone recording that did not capture threats.

The appeal court found no palpable and overriding error, concluding the trial judge's findings were reasonable.

The conviction appeal was dismissed, though a conditional stay was entered for the criminal harassment charges under the Kienapple principle.

The sentence appeal was also dismissed, with a modification to the weapons prohibition from s. 109 to s. 110 of the Criminal Code.

During a criminal trial for historical sexual offences, the accused sought to question character witnesses about whether he had a disposition to commit sexual assault or acts of violence.

The Crown objected, arguing that character evidence from lay witnesses must be limited to evidence of general reputation rather than personal opinions about specific traits or conduct.

The court held that questions about sexual morality or peaceful disposition would elicit impermissible opinion evidence and had minimal probative value in the context of private historical allegations involving a child.

Relying on appellate jurisprudence regarding the limited value of such evidence in sexual offence cases, the judge concluded that the prejudicial effects and trial inefficiency outweighed any probative value.

The proposed questioning was therefore disallowed.

The accused, charged with historical indecent assaults from the 1970s, brought a motion to introduce evidence of an alternate suspect.

The accused sought to introduce evidence that his daughters were sexually assaulted by their cousin during the same time period and in the same locations.

The court applied the air of reality test and found that the proposed evidence was sufficiently connected to the charges to be relevant and probative.

The court concluded that the probative value of the alternate suspect evidence outweighed any prejudicial effect, and the application was granted.