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Ontario Court of Appeal ordered a new trial in a sexual-assault appeal, finding hearsay was admitted without properly hearing the complainant on the voir dire.
The court admitted Thomas Doyle’s primary expert report on Catholic Church hierarchy, canon law, and clergy abuse, and admitted his addendum in part with redactions.
The Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal seeking broader sealing and publication ban orders in civil forfeiture proceedings, upholding redaction of addresses but not names.
The court ruled on hearsay admissibility for two documents about a 1964 road realignment. The Popoff memo was excluded for truth, while the Desimone statutory declaration was admitted.
The Supreme Court of Canada restored David Edward Furey’s convictions, holding the trial judge properly admitted hearsay from a deceased complainant under the principled approach.
Appeal dismissed in a first degree murder conviction. The court upheld admission of pre-hypnosis eyewitness statements and a Mr. Big confession and reenactment.
British Columbia Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal from conviction, holding that admitted hearsay met the principled approach and did not affect the verdicts.
The trial judge erred by admitting the complainant's videotaped police statement: he failed to identify and address case-specific hearsay dangers (perception and sincerity), improperly downplayed the role of cross-examination in the threshold reliability analysis, and made an unsupported positive finding of no motive to fabricate; absent threshold reliability the statement was inadmissible and the conviction could not stand.
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The Court of Appeal held the trial judge erred in excluding the recanted videorecorded statement. Necessity was established by the recantation; the trial judge failed to properly account for key procedural safeguards (availability for cross-examination, the videorecording and transcript) and misapplied the threshold reliability analysis despite strong corroboration between the statement and physical evidence. The residual discretion was misused by treating admissibility as a question of what the Crown 'needed' to make its case. The erroneous exclusion might have had a material bearing on the…
Source excerpt
Necessity was satisfied (declarant deceased) but the Crown failed to prove threshold reliability on the balance of probabilities because E.S.’s prior statements contained material contradictions, plausible alternative explanations for his account existed (fear, hope of benefit, revenge, psychological/addiction issues), and the extrinsic corroborative evidence (limited GSR findings and non‑striking similarity to Ms. MacLean’s testimony) did not rule out those alternatives; therefore the KGB statement is inadmissible under the principled exception.
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