In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that a woman convicted in the 2011 drowning death of a toddler must be acquitted.
The Court clarified one of the routes of when an appeal court can enter such an acquittal and was split 5-4 in its reasons on whether the Court should engage in a framework discussion on a “discretionary acquittal.”
However, the fact that Tammy Bouvette has been at the centre of a miscarriage of justice was not in dispute.
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Kyla Lee, of Acumen Law in Vancouver and past chair of the CBA’s Criminal Justice Section, says that on the one hand, it’s disappointing the Court didn’t deal with the discretionary powers to enter an acquittal. However, she is sympathetic to the majority’s reasoning that this was not the right case to come to a framework.
“You need to have a proper evidentiary foundation for an appeal court to decide an issue, especially one to engage the miscarriages of justice question,” she says.
“They’re right to say let’s wait for an appropriate case because it’s an extreme situation, the Truscott decision was extreme in and of itself, and we’d rather deal with this when it’s on all fours of what happened in the case, so fair enough.”
Lee agrees that the Crown’s statement that they wouldn’t bring evidence if the case was retried was an admission they don’t think it’s in the public interest to continue the prosecution. She says it was the Crown’s fault Bouvette pleaded guilty in the first place, so their position was very principled in light of what happened in the case.
“It certainly would have been easily open to them to say that we know we messed up, but now that she’s got the full disclosure, we can start up again.”
Lee says the stigma that gets attached to a person starts when they’re charged. Even if there is an acquittal, which is preferable to a judicial stay, the stigma follows a person, particularly in a case like this.
