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Current Affairs 2008 - Legal (184 items)
| May 1, 2008 | Pump Up The Rebellion Nothing in last week's rulings detracts from this position. But in the rush to keep kids safe from themselves, some of us adults have forgotten what we do want them to take in at school. Critical thinking and questioning authority should be right up there. Certainly, in my time we were explicitly taught the lessons of moral and social panics exploited by authoritarian figures. In history, for example, we learned about Hitler and other fascist leaders mobilizing supporters on this basis, and in English, we studied Arthur Miller's allegory about the 1950s McCarthy hearings, The Crucible.
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| May 1, 2008 | Sniffing Out the Larger Implications of the Dog Sniff Cases Dogs "Search" When they Sniff for Narcotics
Most importantly, all nine justices (essentially) agreed that when a police dog trained to sniff out narcotics focuses its olfactory powers on an individual's knapsack or luggage, the target's reasonable privacy expectations are encroached upon. In other words, this constitutes a "search" for s. 8 Charter purposes, a conclusion that triggers the "reasonableness" requirements of the guarantee.
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| Apr 30, 2008 | BC: Accused Admit Selling Cannabis NELSON - The owners of the Holy Smoke Culture Shop have admitted in provincial court to selling organic cannabis from their downtown premises.
However, they are putting forward a "defence of necessity," saying they did more good than harm.
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| Apr 30, 2008 | 'There Were Smoky Moments, There Were Non Smoky Moments' t was a lively day at the Nelson courthouse on Monday as the Holy Smoke Culture Shop was once again in the spotlight. Two owners and two associates have been charged with trafficking and they are using the charges to fight the marijuana laws in Canada. Here is some of the banter inside the court and out from the first day of the trial. The trial is expected to resume on Thursday.
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| Apr 29, 2008 | Tiresome Debate This week's Holy Smoke trial is a waste of time and money, but who is to blame?
The Holy Smoke crew are back in the courts this week. They couldn't be happier. They will once again climb up on that pedestal and shout to anyone interested in hearing these two words - legalize it!
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| Apr 29, 2008 | Teens Have Same Rights Random searches of high school lockers by police with drug-sniffing dogs have been routine in Canada for a long time.
Not any more. Last week, the Supreme Court of Canada clamped a tight leash on the canine cannabis sniffers, ruling that warrantless searches were "unlawful" and a breach of privacy under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
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| Apr 28, 2008 | Drug Laws Tested This Week In B.C. Supreme Court In another courtroom, the Vancouver Island Compassion Society will continue its assault on the anti-cannabis criminal law with the resumption of testimony from Senator Pierre Claude Nolin, who led the 2002 parliamentary review of drug policy that concluded pot should be legalized.
They're interrelated cases with national repercussions that rely on a substantially similar body of jurisprudence.
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| Apr 28, 2008 | QU: McGill Students Arrested on 4/20 Two McGill undergraduate students were arrested on lower campus last Sunday when at least eight Montreal police officers swarmed onto campus to break up a small crowd of marijuana smokers.
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| Apr 25, 2008 | Supreme Court Muzzles Sniffer Dogs The use of drug-sniffing police dogs in the random search of a southwestern Ontario school and a Calgary bus terminal was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled Friday.
In a 6-3 decision, the top court ruled that the actions breached Section 8 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which covers what constitutes reasonable search and seizure.
The ruling, which could have an impact on police powers across the country, centred on two cases.
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| Apr 23, 2008 | BC: Lawyer Fights 'Totalitarian' Grow-Op Law His lawyer, Joseph Arvay, is seeking to have the B.C. Supreme Court overturn the provincial government's amendments to the Safety Standards Act, which were designed to allow police officers access to homes where marijuana is suspected of being cultivated without going through the lengthy process of obtaining a search warrant issued under the Criminal Code.
Police have complained that the sheer numbers of homes being used to grow marijuana in B.C. make it impossible for them to use the search warrant process to close them down.
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| Apr 23, 2008 | Pot Church Fights For Home Defence lawyer Peter Boushy argued it was one thing for the Crown to
seek the forfeitures of marijuana grow operations where property
owners stood to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in the proceeds
of crime. It was another matter entirely, he said, for the Crown to
seize the primary residence of two aging men who had sold $70 worth of
pot to an undercover cop.
Total abuse of the system - under these circumstances, millions of Canadians could risk losing their homes... |
| Apr 10, 2008 | SN: Man Convicted in Drug Case Plans to Appeal REGINA -- While he awaits sentencing in Saskatchewan's largest marijuana grow-op bust, Lawrence Hubert Agecoutay has been busy laying the groundwork for his appeal.
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| Apr 3, 2008 | Surrey Fire Plan Smokes Out Area Grow-ops In a nutshell, his research team works on the premise that because the B.C. grow-op problem is so large, there's not nearly enough capacity by police or the courts to deal with it. ..
"The justice system is inept at dealing with this problem so, instead, we've created a system of major disruptions to a grow-operators' business," Plecas explains. "That's the program I outlined at Oxford."
Officially it's known as the Electrical Fire Safety Initiative, primarily because a house containing a grow-op is 29 times more likely to catch fire than a regular house, Plecas says.
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| Apr 3, 2008 | Homegrown Bailout? There's a massive cloud of cannabis confusion hovering around Marc Emery's extradition case now that the deal between the Prince of Pot and U.S. prosecutors has hit the skids.
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| Mar 31, 2008 | Marc Emery Should Not Be Extradited This editorial board has more than once presented its strongest moral case for the Canadian government to block the extradition of Marc Emery, the West Coast marijuana advocate who faces a possible life sentence south of the border for operating a mail-order seed business out of his Vancouver headquarters. It is our view that the differences in the two countries' handling of seed vendors make extraditing Emery a shameful abdication of judgment by the Canadian authorities.
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| Mar 31, 2008 | Ontario Makes Case For Random Police Questioning he Supreme Court is expected to revisit a rule it established 11 years ago that said evidence obtained by police when people are forced to incriminate themselves after their Charter rights have been violated may not be used against them in a trial.
The April 24 hearing stems from an appeal filed by Donnohue Grant, who was convicted of gun possession charges in 2004.
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| Mar 28, 2008 | Coping With The Pain "Who is it harming? Where is the victim?" asks Cheryl MacLellan, co-owner of Hemp Country. "If there is no victim, there ought not to be a crime."
Those comments may be surprising coming from MacLellan who is a former Children's Aid Society child protection worker and a former police officer in the detective's office with the Oxford Community Police Service.
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| Mar 27, 2008 | Alberta: The Nanny State Indeed, they considered it necessary in the preamble to the Drug-Endangered Children Act to state categorically that "children exposed to illegal manufacturing of drugs, indoor cannabis operations, trafficking and other forms of illegal drug activity are victims of abuse."
That is as wild a claim as it is unsupportable. But the circumstances under which it may be invoked are so broad there is little that can be done to counter its stupidity. Although the preamble suggests that only the really serious stuff is the object of the Act, a child is deemed to be drug-endangered if he or she is "exposed" to illegal substances. That's it. Full stop.
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| Mar 20, 2008 | Bill C-26 - Conservative Assault On The Judiciary Our federal Conservative government has a disturbing tendency to circumvent judicial deliberation by imposing upon courts their own authoritarian sense of justice...This supposedly 'tough on crime' strategy embodies the curious mentality with which the Harper Conservatives regard crime: that all transgressions are committed by individuals or groups of individuals, and extenuating circumstances surrounding their offences count little compared to the fact that they are naturally immoral and should be punished.
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| Mar 20, 2008 | Are RCMP Baggage Searches Legal? Serious legal and constitutional questions surround RCMP tactics involving baggage searches at Canadian bus stations, train stations and airports.
This practice has gone on in Canada for several years now, as part of the RCMP's national Jetway program. Jetway targets people travelling with drugs, contraband, weapons or explosives by plane, bus or train. It's part of a larger RCMP program that also deals with people travelling in private vehicles and trucks.
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