Two and a half years after Norman Tate’s son was killed in a car accident, he’s still struggling to come to terms with how the justice system handled the aftermath.
“If you step forward inside that place, you’re flipping a coin — whether you’re going to get justice that day or not,” he said on April 30, standing outside the Ontario Court of Justice in Brantford, Ont.
Norman Tate Junior was killed in a head-on collision a week before Christmas in 2021. The driver in the other car eventually was charged with impaired driving causing death and bodily harm. But the case crawled through the court system and was stayed after it breached the time limits for trials set in a 2016 Supreme Court decision.
That decision in R. v. Jordan established that criminal cases that go beyond those time limits — 18 months for provincial courts and 30 months for superior courts — can be stayed for unreasonable delay.
The problem is that the courts don’t prioritize, and we’re at a point where we need to triage. Cases involving death or serious bodily harm should be jumping the queue, and victimless crimes sent to the back of the bus.
I’ve actually never thought of that solution – here I was all set to snark something like “get more judges”, but your comment was the first one I saw; and rightfully so!
A triage is actually a bizarrely simple idea that I’m embarrassed I didn’t think of it, even as a person of middling intellect.
There’s got to be some reason why we don’t triage this way, though, or my faith in the system is at least such that I feel we should have moved to a triage long ago. Would it unjustly allow petty thieves out the revolving door to offend again and again? We have that now, and there’s a lot of outcry in urban centers where repeat offenders not getting punished is endemic.
If we created a second track for ‘lesser’, victimless-type cases, and used that as offer for newer prosecutors and judges, would that help? Would a lower court of newbies be appropriate and workable? It’s pipelining, but in court.
But even that idea sounds ooky. But I know you’re onto something. I’m sure of it.
When you think about it, triage in medicine is also not an ideal solution. Ideally, in both medicine and law, the system would have enough capacity to deal with everyone in strict first-in-first-out order without anyone being harmed. In the absence of that capacity, we have to decide which cases to look at first somehow, and FIFO doesn’t appear to be the best basis for making that decision.
We need more judges too, but even if we were to somehow force legislators to select them this instant, some cases would end up getting dropped before the backlog got caught up. I’d much prefer that they were things like solicitation, small-amount drug posession, and minor traffic violations—not petty theft if we can help it, since that isn’t a victimless crime, but I’d nevertheless rather have ten petty theft cases dropped than one assault case that landed someone in the hospital.
It’s a flawed solution for a flawed world.
The article suggests prosecutors do prioritize:
Delays often force Crown prosecutors to decide which cases go forward and which don’t.
And provinces are apparently looking at dropping charges early to prioritize those that will likely succeed:
Alberta is switching to a pre-screening charge process, similar to one in B.C., to weed out more charges before they get into the court system.
Saskatchewan courts don’t collect data on Jordan applications.
Had to know at least one right-wing-led province would ignore statistic collection.
Having a solid justice system is important, because if you don’t, you start hearing the argument that police brutality isn’t a bad thing because it’s the only way offenders get punished. (Sadly, I have heard this argument from people who should know better.)
AI judges! As long as we are using “AI” to replace humans why not do it in a place where we are already short staffed?
spoiler
Not to mention I think I could prompt my way out of at least a speeding ticket.
How do you erode something that does not exist? Anyone who has “faith” in the justice system has not paid attention for the last 50 years.
A lot of municipalities these days are also falling all over themselves to put up speeding and red light cameras everywhere, which increases the institutional delay in our court systems. The ugly truth is that you just need to demand a court date for any ticket and they’ll maybe get to you in four years. Putting together your own charter 11b challenge template, which is pretty damned easy in the Internet age, lets you pretty much ignore the cameras.
I don’t have to ignore the cameras because my municipality decided the best place for the camera was at surface level in front of a high school.
I see someone out there nearly every day replacing the lens cover due to vandalism. Why they arent mounted on a pole like every other municipality is a mystery to me.
