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Criminal - Appeals - Crown Appeals from Acquittal [CCC 676] (2). R. v. Singh
In R. v. Singh (Ont CA, 2025) the Ontario Court of Appeal dismissed a Crown criminal appeal:Governing Principles
[16] Section 676(1)(a) of the Criminal Code provides that:The Attorney General or counsel instructed by him for the purpose may appeal to the Court of Appeal:Against a judgment or verdict of acquittal or a verdict of not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder of a trial court in proceedings by indictment on any ground of appeal that involves a question of law alone. [Emphasis added.] [17] In R. v. Hodgson, 2024 SCC 25, 494 D.L.R. (4th) 501, the Supreme Court discussed the limited scope of a Crown appeal and the rationale for unequal access to the appellate process. One of the reasons for limiting a Crown appeal to a question of law alone is to ensure that someone is not placed in jeopardy twice for the same matter: at paras. 29-31. The distinction between a trial judge’s (and jury’s) unique duty to find facts, which should not be revisited after an acquittal, and pure questions of law, which in some instances can, serves to protect acquitted persons from “the repeated exercise of [the power to deprive their liberty] on the same facts unless for strong reasons of public policy”: at para. 30, quoting Cullen v. The King, 1949 CanLII 7 (SCC), [1949] S.C.R. 658, at p. 668, per Rand J., dissenting. Put another way, restricting the Crown’s right of appeal is to ensure that legal errors are rectified when necessary, but not to allow a reconsideration of the facts.
[18] As the majority in Hodgson explains, a legal error is generally “a purely legal conclusion drawn from the evidence without calling into question the trial judge's evaluation of the evidence”: at para. 33, citing M. Vauclair, T. Desjardins and P. Lachance, Traité général de preuve et de procédure pénales 2023 (30th ed. 2023), at para. 51.55.
[19] Even when the Crown successfully argues that a trial judge committed an error in law, it bears the “heavy onus” of “establish[ing] that the [error] might reasonably have had a material bearing on the acquittal”: R. v. Graveline, 2006 SCC 16, [2006] 1 S.C.R. 609, at para. 14; R. v. Vaillancourt, 2019 ABCA 317, 93 Alta. L.R. (6th) 98, at para. 14.
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