The Sleepwalking Drunk Driver
In R. v. Desrosiers , 2017 ONCJ 299 (CanLII), the Ontario Court of Justice held that it was more probable than not that the accused was in a state of automatism (due to sleepwalking or parasomnia) when she operated her motor vehicle with a blood-alcohol concentration three times above the legal limit (267 and 288 mg. of alcohol in 100 ml., respectively). The resulting verdict: Not Criminally Responsible. It is curious, at least to me, that the Court appears to have placed marginal importance on the accused’s evidence that one of the last things she remembered before waking up in a police holding cell was ingesting the sedative-hypnotic Zopiclone. The defence of automatism The leading case dealing with the defence of automatism is the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in R v Stone. The principles to be derived from that decision can be summarized as follows: · Automatism is defined as “a state of impaired conscio...