Man acquitted in violent attack due to intoxication

So that means if someone on mushrooms kills someone while driving he shouldn't be held responsible either. 

Simple. He was high and not in his right state of mind so he's not an evil person. He still did it.  He chose to take the illegal drugs so he's responsible for what happened. Throw him in jail.

Misfit wrote:

Ontario Court of Appeal rules section 33.1 of criminal code unconstitutional thus allowing severe intoxication as a valid defence for sexual assault.

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/beta.ctvnews.ca/local/toronto/2020/6/5/1_4971355.html

That's ridiculous. A very common requirement that judges often hand down as part of their sentencing involves telling people to refrain from consuming alcohol. Intoxication is no excuse, and on that, I agree with the right-wing tough-on-crime crowd. It's things like this that cause people to lose confidence in the legal system, whigh gives the right-wing tough-on-crime crowd ammunition.

Misfit wrote:

I believe that the Supreme Court of Canada made a ghastly mistake with their Daviault ruling. I want to know how it can be corrected.

 

The SCC can overrule itself when new facts present a different picture. For instance the right to bargain was not a Charter right only the right to association was said the SCC to the North West Territory employees but then it met the BC Liberal party's lawyers who ripped up all the public service contracts and said fuck you to the unions, its legal.

I haven't read the decision but the law that underlies it was around when I went to law school thirty years ago. Bad facts make for bad law is an old adage. Our justice system has the concept of not being held criminally responsible because of ones mental state so a man who killed his daughter with an axe did not get convicted of murder because he was dissociative and not mentally aware of his actions. I find that a stretch for sexual assault and drunkenness so maybe I need to read the fact situation to make any sense of this seemingly absurd ruling.

Couple of articles in the national post recently discussed this issue and the Daviault case, I thought they laid out the issues pretty clearly (the colby cosh one is clearly in favour of 33.1 being struck down and presents a case for it).   

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/colby-cosh-the-unpopular-automatism-defence-is-revived

"Last week the Ontario Court of Appeal struck down Section 33.1 of the country’s Criminal Code: this is the provision introduced in 1995 that abolished the so-called “automatism” defence to criminal charges involving threats or violence. The language of the section is finicky, but its nature is pretty basic: the text begins with, “It is not a defence,” before going on to define the state of automatism. Or, more strictly, “self-induced intoxication” that deprives one of being capable of having the intent or will to commit a violent act.

In legal terms Sec. 33.1 was controversial because it represents a denial of the common-law requirement that persons cannot be convicted of a crime unless there was some intention to commit one. A crime must normally have a “mens rea,” a mental element. In political terms, it might be one of the more popular passages in the Criminal Code. When the Supreme Court upheld an automatism defence against a Crown appeal in its 1994 Daviault ruling, Parliament acted unusually quickly to outlaw the defence, with the support of both law-and-order conservatives and feminists.

The automatism concept often creeps into trials, when it does, after a man has gotten high on something or other (typically not alcohol) and done something horrifying and brutal to a woman. In the two cases that culminated in last week’s Ontario ruling, LEAF, the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund, had done its heroic best as an intervenor to help save 33.1."   ....

"Parliament’s action in taking a species of defence altogether away from consideration by a judge or a jury has been reversed, in a way, for its lack of sophistication. There was no real sign in the record of a bona fide effort to preserve or even recognize the rights of a criminal defendant.

Some judges have hinted in the past that the right answer for Daviault-haters would be to invent a new offence that criminalizes intentional self-intoxication that leads to violence — thus attaching the mens rea of the offence to a culpable action. But Parliament simply declared that the automatism defence can never be used, and that’s that. (One subtlety in the new Sullivan ruling is that the eponymous Sullivan didn’t even mean to get high. He had supposedly tried to kill himself by taking an overdose of Wellbutrin, an antidepressant he was prescribed to quit smoking, and he ended up stabbing an “alien,” actually his mother, while in the grip of a known side effect. Perhaps the Ontario court was waiting all those years for an automatism case this favourable.)"

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/court-throws-out-law-barring-self-induced-intoxication-as-defence-to-violence

"The court did recognize that victims of such violence are victims, regardless of whether their attacker meant to hurt them or not.   “However, to convict an attacker of offences for which they do not bear the moral fault required by the charter to avoid this outcome is to replace one injustice for another and at an intolerable cost to the core principles that animate criminal liability,” the Appeal Court said.

Chan was ordered to stand trial again. Sullivan was acquitted.

The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund, which intervened in the case, called the decision a setback for victims, particularly of sexual assault.

“We are dismayed that women’s rights to equality and dignity are not given more adequate treatment,” the organization said on Thursday. “It also risks sending a dangerous message that men can avoid accountability for their acts of violence against women and children through intoxication.”

Cara Zwibel, a director with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said the decision clarified the legal situation around use of the intoxication defence. While she sympathized with concerns the ruling would undermine protections for sexual assault victims, she said they were overblown.

“I don’t see it as seriously undermining the rights of victims,” Zwibel said. “This is a rarely used provision; it’s not this widespread, systemic concern.”