OHTA.ca

I been reading some of the posts on this forum and they are very helpful and informative...

Having said that, I have two questions that I could not find any topics or answers on:

1. Where do I find victim surcharge and court charge that gets added to the set fine? If I'm trying to figure out the ticket has a fatal error or not.

2. There is lots of cases describing what's unreasonable delay of court proceedings, but I can't see anything putting some kind of time limits on how long disclosure can be delayed. Anyone know of any case law that can help in this regard?

My point is, if the the crown is trying to play a dirty game (if being the operative word), they can get you the evidence two days before court and claim they did what they were required to do, but that is not fair as you did not have time to do any research on it. Yes, I have seen posts that say JP told the person go read the disclosure and come back in 15 minutes, but let's face it, that is not fair and not just. So I am not looking for these scenarios.

I beleive the courts have ruled that if the Set Fine is incorrect it is a fatal error, but if the Total Payable (which includes victim surcharge and court costs) is incorrect this is NOT a fatal error. Somebody else can hopefully confirm this.

What happens with an unreasonable delay is that the court will look at who caused each delay and why they caused it, and then decide whether it counts against the prosecutor, the accused or neither. With disclosure you need to be pro-active in requesting and checking if it is ready (not that I agree with this, but that is what the courts have decided). So let's say you made initial request as soon as you got your notice of trial, and then you made additional inquiries every couple months right up until your trial, and the prosecutor still did not actually have it ready until a couple days before the trial. You have every right to ask for another trial as you have not had time to review it and prepare. Now what is important to understand at a trial, is that everything you say goes into the record, and it is a transcript of this record that a Judge will review when deciding about unreasonable delay. If you do not say something then it will not be on the record and it may not be considered by the judge when looking into unreasonable delay. So I highly recommend that when you are asking for a new trial date because of late disclosure that you SAY something like:

Now if you request a new trial date a year from the current one, they are not going to count all of that against the prosecution. But if you are stating that you need a reasonable time (a month) to get ready AND you clearly made the effort to get disclosure and it was clearly delayed, then you have a good chance that it will be counted against them.

O. Reg. 161/00: VICTIM FINE SURCHARGES