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The courtroom of the temporary Supreme Court of Canada, located in the West Memorial Building in Ottawa, is seen on Sept. 4.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
The Supreme Court of Canada on Friday clarified how the justice system should handle delays after a person is convicted of a crime but before they are sentenced, ruling that such situations must be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Friday’s judgment, called R.B.-C., involved a conviction for sexual assault where it took more than a year to deliver the sentence.
The unanimous court took a relatively narrow approach to answer specific questions in the R.B.-C. appeal.
The case intersected with major legal issues: the protection in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to be tried within a reasonable time when charged with a crime, and what happens when that right is violated.
Such questions are usually focused on the process of a criminal trial. The Supreme Court a decade ago, in the landmark Jordan ruling, set strict deadlines for trials to be completed, from charge to conviction. If there’s an unreasonable delay that violates the Charter, a Supreme Court precedent from 1987 called Rahey means that the only outcome is a stay of proceedings. The accused is freed without a verdict.
Delays plague Canada’s justice system. Parliament and the Supreme Court in recent months have wrestled with the challenge. The Supreme Court earlier this year said it might reconsider its Rahey precedent.
Parliament and Supreme Court eye major shift on trial delays
Friday’s R.B.-C. judgment zeroed in on delays between conviction and sentencing. It was written by Justice Sheilah Martin in her final months of work as she retires this year.
If there is a Charter violation of unreasonable delay after conviction, the top court said the remedy in most cases is a reduction in the sentence levied on the offender. The court noted that it had not previously provided such precise guidance.
The court further said that delays after conviction should not be measured against a strict deadline, the way Jordan is used to consider trial delays. The key difference between the two phases is a person at trial is presumed innocent.
In the R.B.-C. case, a man studying for his PhD at a university in Ontario assaulted his new girlfriend one evening in 2019. The Ontario Court of Justice convicted him in 2021, but it took more than a year to render the punishment: a conditional sentence of two years less a day.
The man asked the Ontario Court of Justice for a stay of the proceedings because of unreasonable delay. The court said no. But the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2024 ruled that there was an unreasonable delay. Both courts were working with a rule applicable only in Ontario, a five-month deadline to deliver a sentence after conviction.
The Ontario appeal court reduced his conditional sentence by four months.
Court delays in sex-assault cases increase despite Supreme Court deadlines, report finds
At the Supreme Court, the man, R.B.-C., once more sought a complete stay of the proceedings – which would wipe out his conviction.
On Friday, the top court said no.
The Supreme Court agreed that there was an unreasonable delay in his sentencing, engaging the Charter of Rights. The top court also agreed with the Ontario appeal court’s move to reduce the conditional sentence by four months.
The Supreme Court, however, rejected the idea of a five-month deadline between conviction and sentencing.
Justice Martin, invoking the central rationale of the Jordan ruling, said trial deadlines were established to address a “proven culture of complacency in bringing accused persons to trial.”
On delays between conviction and sentencing, she said strict deadlines didn’t make sense because “no comparable evidentiary foundation has been established.”
Lawyers for R.B.-C. on Friday said they were disappointed that the Supreme Court will allow sentencing proceedings to continue “even after they have become unconstitutional” because of unreasonable delay.
“Courts, more than any other institution, should respect constitutional rights,” said lawyers Arash Ghiassi and Julia Kirby of Savards LLP in a statement.
They said that allowing cases to drag on beyond the point of unreasonable delay “will not fix the system.” They also said Friday’s ruling means that R.B.-C., an Iranian, may be deported back to Iran because of his conviction and his immigration status.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, an intervener in the case, on Friday said sentence reductions are not a meaningful remedy for a violation of a Charter right. The advocacy group added that the vagueness of the remedy does not “provide the clarity necessary” to push the justice system to render sentences in a timely manner.
Beyond the R.B.-C. case itself, the broader question of how the Supreme Court may grapple with the issue of cases stayed because of unreasonable trial delays is not yet answered.
In May, in another Jordan-related ruling, Chief Justice Richard Wagner said the court might reconsider its Rahey precedent, which dictates that a stay is the only remedy for an unreasonable trial delay.
“It may be that the time is near at hand when Rahey should be revisited,” the Chief Justice wrote.