Stuart O'Connell Criminal Law Blog

A condominium board has authority to cooperate with the police but only to a reasonable extent. As the Court of Appeal for Ontario tells us in R. v. Yu, 2019 ONCA 942, what is reasonable is informed by the constitutionally-protected reasonable privacy expectations of those who reside at the condominium.  Under provincial law, a condominium corporation has a statutory duty to administer the common elements and to manage the property of the corporation on behalf of the owners. [FN1]  The board is elected by the owners to manage these affairs in their best interests. [FN2] This statutory duty confers a responsibility and authority on the board to act as the decision maker for the owners as a collective. R. v. Yu , at para. 91. The condominium board and, by extension, property management, are entrusted with security of the building and the residents.   Residents reasonably expect that a property manager could consent to police entry into the building and its hallways and, in f

There is no rule as to how victims of sexual assault are apt to behave.    A trial judge makes a fatal error in reasoning when that judge bases findings of credibility on assumptions that are unsupported by the evidence.  It is an error of law to rely on pre-conceived views about how a sexual assault victim would behave.   R. v. D.D., 2000 SCC 43 (CanLII),   [2000] 2 S.C.R. 275 at para. 65;  R. v. A.R.J.D., 2018 SCC 6 (CanLII) ,  [2018] 1 S.C.R. 218, at para. 2.  Although trial judges must exercise common sense when making credibility findings and resolving what actually happened in a case, relying upon assumptions about what women will and will not do may impact a judge’s objective deliberation of the reasonable doubt standard. R. v. J.L. , 2018 ONCA 756 (CanLII), at para. 47: where the trial judge improperly relied on a behavioural assumption in assessing credibility, viz: "I cannot accept that a young woman would go outside wearing a dress in mid-December