The Jury Charge: Judges are not Court Reporters
Trial judges have a broad discretion in how to charge a jury. Their decision about how much evidence to review, what structure to use and how to organize the charge falls within that discretion. But, ideally, the charge should contain some basic components. One of these components is to set out for the jury the material evidence relevant to the issues that the jury must resolve. It is not the function of a trial judge to simply review at length all of the evidence (in reality the judge’s notes of the evidence) that the jury has heard. Rather, the task of the trial judge is to explain the critical evidence and the law and relate them to the essential issues in plain, understandable language. R. v. Jack (1993), 88 Man. R. (2d) 93 (C.A.), aff’d [1994] 2 S.C.R. 310, at para. 39. Going through the evidence witness by witness A witness by witness recitation of the evidence is almost always ineffective. It is ineffective for at least two reasons. 1. ...