OHTA.ca

Hi all,

I had a court date where, with about 45 minutes left to go and me being the last person (and only one requesting a trial), the judge decided that he had been sitting there too long and made me go with a new date. I was ready to proceed and stated as much, and requested that the case be dismissed, but the judge said that since it wasn't something which was charged to the prosecution that this wouldn't happen. Unfortunately it's only been 6 months (Mid october -> mid April) so far, and my new court date is set 3 months from now (about 9 months from the offense). Could I get away with an 11b application?

Do I have any recourse? I took the entire day off to defend myself, it really sucks to have to go through the process of waiting patiently for 3h again.

Thanks

The court (i.e. the justice) has discretion to adjourn the trial to another date, and the court exercised that discretion in your case.

Having said that, your objection to adjourning the trial will help you in the future if you decide to bring an 11b application. It will be shown on court records and transcript that you wanted the trial completed as soon as possible. You can explain how the delay has impacted your life and inconvenienced you in a future 11b application.

However, the courts are applying a new framework set out in a relatively recent decision by the Supreme Court (R. v. Jordan, 2016 SCC 27, [2016] 1 S.C.R. 631: https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-c ... 7/index.do), where the time has been set to 18 months for unreasonable delay. So you may not be successful in bringing an 11b application after only 9 months.

More info on 11b charter issue and 18 month issue here: