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Full bibliography 499 resources
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Bruce A MacFarlane, 2006 31-3 Manitoba Law Journal 403, 2006 CanLIIDocs 132
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This paper draws from the wrongful convictions of women to interrogate the limits of dominant conceptions of wrongful conviction. Most North American innocence projects turn on a conception of demonstrable factual innocence. The paper argues that this focus is problematic as a matter of criminal law principle and presents particular difficulties for women. The paper identifies that family violence forms the primary context for both the conviction of women for violent crimes, and for women's wrongful convictions. Taking two key examples of family violence – child homicide and intimate partner violence – we illustrate that the prevailing focus on demonstrable factual innocence fits awkwardly with identified wrongful convictions in these areas, and argue that this focus may deflect attention from unidentified miscarriages of justice. We suggest that focusing on factual innocence undermines the criminal justice system's proper focus on state responsibilities, including the responsibility to protect women and children from harm, and the asymmetric burden of proof that applies in criminal cases.
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The Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions www.wrongfulconviction.ca .like similar registries in the United States and the United Kingdom, was designed to facilitate research on patterns and trends in wrongful convictions. As of its launch in February 2023, 15 of 83 remedied wrongful convictions or 17% were the result of guilty pleas by the accused. This is a similar percentage as found in a UK registry and lower than the 27% of guilty plea wrongful convictions found in the US registry. Forty percent of the guilty plea wrongful convictions were entered by women. Most of these involved the flawed expert testimony of Charles Smith about the cause of baby deaths and the majority of all remedied guilty plea wrongful convictions were for imagined crimes that did not happen. Almost half (7 of 15) of Canada’s false guilty pleas were taken from racialized people including three Indigenous men, one Black and Indigenous man, another Black man and a Brown man who had recently immigrated from India. Two of the fifteen false guilty pleas were taken from accused persons who had diagnosed mental health and cognitive challenges. With the exclusion of one false guilty plea to a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment and ineligibility for parole for 10 years, the average sentence in the remaining 14 cases was 10 months with evidence of “lop-sided” pleas especially in the cases involving Charles Smith and 2 of the 14 received sentences of time already served.
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Drawing on Rachel Dioso-Villa''s repository of wrongful convictions published in this issue, this article examines known cases of wrongful convictions of Indigenous persons in Australia and Canada. It finds that Indigenous people are over-represented among the wrongfully convicted in relation to their representation in the population in both Australia and Canada. At the same time, there are likely many undiscovered wrongful convictions of Indigenous persons especially when the over-representation of Indigenous men and women in prison is considered. A factor in this likely under-representation of Indigenous people among remedied wrongful convictions may be the incentives that accused, especially Indigenous women, face to plead guilty even if they are not guilty. This finding underlines some of the dangers of limiting wrongful convictions to cases of proven factual innocence and not including among the wrongfully convicted those who may have valid defences such as self-defence.
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Lee Stuesser, 2006 31-3 Manitoba Law Journal 543, 2006 CanLIIDocs 135
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Malini Vjaykumar, 2018 51-1 UBC Law Review 161, 2018 CanLIIDocs 11248
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Bruce H Wildsmith, 1991 55-1 Saskatchewan Law Review 97, 1991 CanLIIDocs 529
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Graham Zellick, 2006 31-3 Manitoba Law Journal 555, 2006 CanLIIDocs 136
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Between 2006 to 2008, no less than three public inquiries recommended that, absent a reasonable likelihood of re-prosecution, prosecutors should allow the wrongfully convicted to be acquitted and not be subject to prosecutorial stays. Prosecutorial stays are an exercise of prosecutorial discretion under. 579 of the Criminal Code that can only be challenged with evidence of flagrant impropriety. They do not provide protection against double jeopardy. They can amount to a third “legal limbo” verdict between guilty and not guilty. Only two prosecutorial services in Canada have adopted the three inquiry recommendations in their guidelines or deskbooks. This failure has real world consequences: namely at least five cases involving seven accused in four different provinces since 2016 where convictions were overturned because of new evidence relevant to guilt or innocence only to be the subject of a prosecutorial stay which deprived the previously convicted person of a verdict on the merits. In addition to being at odds with the three inquiry recommendations, such uses of prosecutorial stays promote continued suspicion of the wrongfully convicted and create two classes of the wrongfully convicted: those who are acquitted and those who only receive a prosecutorial stay.
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The author traces the history of criminal appeals legislation in Canada from the Crown Cases Act of 1848 to the present. Through his analysis he illustrates the various forces giving rise to change and amendment, with special emphasis on the strong and often inappropriate influence of British legislation. In addition, the author examines the aim of national uniformity in criminal procedure, and the way in which appeals legislation has fostered this aim.
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The overarching theme of this collection is the influence of apex courts on the development of the common law¹ – in particular, how the institutional position of apex courts causes them to shape the common law and, conversely, how the traditions of the common law shape the way in which apex courts conceive of their role. Contributors from around the common law world address the overarching theme in three different contexts: first, the particular characteristics of the apex courts of several selected jurisdictions; second, the influence, if any, of constitutionalism and bills of rights on apex courts’ relationships to the
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