Marie Henein

The appellant was convicted of second degree murder after taking the life of his severely disabled daughter.

At trial, the judge removed the defence of necessity from the jury after closing addresses and instructed the jury not to concern itself with the penalty.

Following conviction, the trial judge granted a constitutional exemption from the mandatory minimum sentence of life imprisonment without parole eligibility for 10 years.

The Court of Appeal restored the mandatory minimum sentence.

The Supreme Court of Canada dismissed the appeals against conviction and sentence, holding that there was no air of reality to the defence of necessity, the trial was not rendered unfair by the timing of the ruling or the judge's instructions, and the mandatory minimum sentence did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment under s. 12 of the Charter given the gravity of the offence.

Criminal appeals from convictions for conspiracy to commit robbery arising out of a series of planned and attempted armoured car robberies, together with sentence appeals concerning compensation orders and one custodial term.

The court rejected challenges to the trial judge’s Vetrovec instruction, the use of contextual evidence under the Carter conspiracy framework, the refusal to edit a prior manslaughter conviction, the handling of alleged threat evidence, the in-court identification ruling, and the claim that the verdict was unreasonable.

However, the court held that the jury was not properly instructed on the impermissible use of bad character and propensity evidence led against one appellant by a co-accused.

The appeal of one appellant was dismissed in full, while the other appellant’s conviction was set aside and a new trial ordered; the compensation order appeal was dismissed.

The appellant appealed a jury conviction for second degree murder and sought leave to appeal sentence.

The Court of Appeal held that the trial judge wrongly excluded post-arrest utterances that were capable of supporting defence psychiatric evidence on cocaine intoxication and cocaine psychosis, and also erred in refusing to leave provocation with the jury because there was some evidence on which a properly instructed jury could find the partial defence.

The court rejected the argument that a later hospital statement was admissible to rebut recent fabrication, found no reversible error in the intoxication charge, and declined to interfere on motive.

The conviction was quashed and a new trial ordered, making it unnecessary to address sentence.

The Crown appealed as of right from a decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal, which had allowed the accused's appeal from her manslaughter conviction and ordered a new trial based on errors in the jury charge regarding self-defence.

The Supreme Court of Canada dismissed the appeal, agreeing substantially with the reasons of the majority of the Court of Appeal, and confirmed the order for a new trial.

The appellant appealed his convictions for sexual assault and unlawful confinement to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Court dismissed the appeal from the bench, adopting the reasons of the majority of the Court of Appeal.

The appellants were charged with failing to comply with an administrative order issued under the Environmental Protection Act requiring them to clean up PCB contamination at an abandoned mine.

They did not appeal the order to the Environmental Appeal Board but attempted to collaterally attack its validity at their penal trial.

The Supreme Court of Canada held that the trial judge lacked jurisdiction to rule on the validity of the order, as the legislature intended the specialized appeal board to be the exclusive forum for such challenges.