Robson Crim Legal Blog

Drones have become a hot button topic at the dinner table with respect to issues of privacy, trespass, and state surveillance, but the ability of retail drones to facilitate criminal activity seems to have garnered less attention. Drone technology itself isn’t particularly new. It’s origins date back as far as the 19th century “when the Austrians used pilotless hot-air balloons to bomb Venice.”

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (“the Charter”) establishes in section 11(b) that any person who is charged with an offence must be tried for that offence in a reasonable amount of time.1 Not long after the Charter went into effect, the Supreme Court of Canada (“the Court”) clarified in R v Rahey (“Rahey”) that in order to violate section 11(b), a delay would have to be shockingly long, to an unconscionable degree.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) recently delivered its verdict in the Dominic Ongwen trial. The trial received quite a bit of attent

Where the Crown has employed the use of a civilian agent to procure evidence from a criminal enterprise that agent’s credibility becomes integral to the credibility of any evidence they procure. This is especially true when the agent has some aspect of their person, such as a criminal history, which might indicate some level of untrustworthiness. In this case the civilian agent is the sole source of the evidence produced against the appellant, and the agent’s trustworthiness.

Although unrelated to the original intention in investigating the case, R v Dowd brings up some interesting concepts in relation to the jurisprudence surrounding evidence in trials. One of these includes the concept of trial by ambush. For some context, the case of R v Dowd involves a former police officer accused of sexual assault (indecent touching) on a nine-year old girl.