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Evidence - Witness - Candour. R. v. Cordeiro
In R. v. Cordeiro (Ont CA, 2024) the Ontario Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal, this from one count of sexual assault.
Here the court comments on the effect of witness candour:[14] When the trial judge next stated that the complainant’s confusion enhanced her credibility, in our view, the trial judge evidently meant that the complainant’s candour about her confusion gave more credibility to her evidence regarding what occurred during the whole interaction. In other words, the complainant’s candour about being confused at the beginning of the encounter made her evidence as a whole more credible because it made it less likely that she was lying about the non-consensual and violent aspects of the encounter, as the appellant contended at trial. It is not improper for a trial judge to view a witness’s candour as supporting that witness’s credibility. As this court held in R. v. E.A.P., 2022 ONCA 134, at para. 18, a “finding properly rooted in the evidence that there are strong indicia of candour and forthrightness in a witness’s testimony, are positive features of that witness’s evidence, capable of supporting a finding that the witness’s evidence is credible”; see also R. v. R.S.L., 2021 ONCA 576, at para. 29; and R. v. R.M., 2019 ONCA 419, at paras. 29-30. This line of reasoning was supported by the complainant’s evidence and the trial judge was entitled to follow it.
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