Welcome to Cases That Should Have Gone to the Supreme Court of Canada, But Didn’t! This week, lawyer Kyla Lee discusses private prosecutions.
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.
If a jury is given instructions by a judge after hearing all of the evidence of a trial and then goes out for deliberations, something that happens sometimes is that juries can ask the judge to replay a certain portion of the evidence. This happened to Mohand Mohamad.
In his case, the jury asked to hear a specific portion of a videotaped statement that he gave which was inconsistent with his evidence at trial about what had happened that night. It was obviously going to be a central feature in a determination of whether or not his testimony was believed and ultimately, whether or not he was going to be convicted.
The judge agreed that he shouldn’t just play a portion of the video back to the jurors, the jurors should be made to watch the whole video. However, the judge disagreed that the cross-examination on the statements he made in the video and the cross-examination that addressed the prior inconsistent statements should also be played for the jury so that they could have the full thing in context again.
Watch the video for more.
