Brandon Chung

Seeking any criminal defence lawyers (past or current) who identify as female or BIPOC to email msputka@fentonlaw.ca your interest in participating in a confidential interview. The CLAs Diversity and Women’s Committee successfully received one of the @LawSocietyLSO Equity Grants.

@SewrattanLaw Thanks, Chris. And thank you to your sister as well!

Great win by all counsel, especially @bashchung and Danielle Robitaille. Ashley, my sister/law partner, was co-counsel for their client at trial. She was devastated when her client was convicted. She's happy to see him vindicated with an acquittal.

R. v. Shaw, 2024 ONCA 119 at para 129: Cross-examination at trial is a significant procedural guarantee of threshold reliability in a hearsay application. coadecisions.ontariocourts.ca/coa/coa/en/ite…

@SewrattanLaw Maybe that's uncharitable but this was an unforced error.

@SewrattanLaw This gets cast as being about a “relationship” not being protected and its impact is maybe lessened by the police sting. But honestly, how different is that statement from what Doherty J.A. seems to say: “drunk drivers can’t expect evidence of their drinking to be private”.

R. v. Singh, 2024 ONCA 66: No reasonable expectation of privacy when the police learn in and smell the breath of a D during an interview where the D is falling in and out of conciousness in an emergency room coadecisions.ontariocourts.ca/coa/coa/en/ite…

@SewrattanLaw This feels like a short version of what Brown J was trying to say about REP in the context of child luring investigations in Mills

I genuinely applaud the Court's intellectual honesty. Normally this is saying the quiet part out loud. Still, I'm not sure that investigative importance informs the reasonableness of one's privacy expectation, as opposed to the reasonableness of a law invading that expectation

@SewrattanLaw Tough to figure out something that makes no sense

@bashchung It's an asymmetry that pre-trial custody can reduce the sentence to allow for probation but not a conditional sentence. Tough to wrap my head around.

R. v. Johnston, 2023 ONCA 808: Court says the judge was wrong to issue a conditional sentence because she found a 3 year sentence to be just, and then deducted 12.5ish months for Summers/Duncan. I'm confused. coadecisions.ontariocourts.ca/coa/coa/en/ite…

@SewrattanLaw That time also arguably works rehabilitation. At least for those two reasons, time spent in custody should change the calculus of whether a conditional sentence is appropriate. Fice was wrong to interpret “appropriate sentence” in 742 as restrictively as it did. Sigh

@SewrattanLaw Fice fails to recognize that time spent incarcerated acts to pay down a moral debt (I don’t love thinking of it this way, but I think at least doctrinally this is implied by the idea that moral blameworthiness is both a justification for and a constraint on punishment).

@SewrattanLaw Thank you, Chris! Appreciate the shout out.

Great work by @bashchung and Matt Gourlay. Incredibly smart lawyers!

R. v. S.B., 2023 ONCA 784: In a sexual assault trial, the trial judge must relate the defendant's testimony, even if it's only circumstantial evidence, to the issue of whether the complainant had the capacity to consent coadecisions.ontariocourts.ca/coa/coa/en/ite…

Subscribe here: hearsaydaily.ca/subscribe

@HearsayDaily is an amazing resource that anyone interested in law-related news in Canada should follow. It’s a quick daily read that pulls together everything from case summaries to legislative developments to local stories. Not sure how @DylanJGibbs does it but I’m glad he does

I too am running for a CLA Toronto position and would ask you to vote for me of course, but there are 8 spots and I hope you also consider Chris for one of those spots. He's dedicated to the practice of criminal law and would be an amazing addition to the board.

Please consider voting for me for an Executive position on the @ClaOntario. Voting starts today. My platform is on the ballot.

R. v. Agpoon, 2023 ONCA 449: I don't tweet my own cases but you need to know this one coadecisions.ontariocourts.ca/coa/coa/en/ite…

@SunKerry Maybe it’s about the terms here, since “commentary” is broad. I just thought this discussion obscured what was clear in Le: that JN can be taken of facts established in academic work, as long as it meets the relevant test. But if “commentary” is just legal opinion then I agree

@bashchung I think it goes to the same point. One reason why we should distinguish commentary and fact is that the latter is subject to those procedural constraints. Hence, academic commentary should be recognised as such, as opposed to classified as 'fact' and eligible for judicial notice.

But hard to see how the statement that “academic commentary or scholarship … is not properly the subject of judicial notice” squares with Le at paras. 82-89, which recognizes that “authoritative studies, research and articles” can establish social context via judicial notice

@SunKerry Maybe I can put it this way: it’s not like the application of those safeguards could ever lead to a circumstance where legal opinion goes in to help resolve a factual question. Opinion just doesn’t do that.

@SunKerry If that’s all then ok. But the issue then isn’t that the risk commentary may “result in evidence being imported into judicial proceedings indirectly, bypassing the relevant evidentiary safeguards”. It’s that a legal opinion doesn’t help resolve factual q’s because…how could it?