Welcome to Cases That Should Have Gone to the Supreme Court of Canada, But Didn’t! This week, lawyer Kyla Lee discusses the unreasonable delay and the time that judges take to make a decision.
Acumen Law Corporation lawyer Kyla Lee gives her take on a made-in-Canada court case each week and discusses why these cases should have been heard by Canada’s highest court: the Supreme Court of Canada.
When arguments are made before a judge, they can’t always make a decision right away. They need time to consider the arguments, the evidence, the case law and arrive at a justified decision. Unfortunately for Myriam Mamouni, this caused a significant delay in her trial. She was charged with possession of cocaine for the purposes of trafficking and ultimately convicted.
After her conviction, she applied for a stay of the proceedings on the basis of her right to be tried within a reasonable time had been breached. The reason she argued was in part that the judge had taken so long to render a decision in her case.
The Supreme Court of Canada had said in the Jordan/Cody decisions that the relevant time period is not the time from when the evidence begins to when the evidence ends, but from when the information is laid until the conclusion of the proceedings.
Unfortunately, the SCC missed the opportunity here, just like they put hard deadlines on counsel to get cases done in a certain amount of time, to put deadlines on judges to get decisions done in a certain amount of time.
Watch the video for more.
