Sounds about right, the RCMP has a long history of First Nations neglect. This seems like it would be a straightforward case to prove his innocence. Also a good reminder of why it's important to never speak with police without a lawyer.
https://blogs.ubc.ca/ijhr/2021/11/29/the-right-to-counsel-it...
You can refuse to answer most questions during questioning, but even if you yell “lawyer!!!” A million times and spill the beans after the millionth repeat question, you’re screwed.
Then there’s the constitution “protections” about illegally gained evidence where the judge can say “yeah, it was unconstitutional but I’ll allow it anyway”
There are circumstances where you can be interviewed without a lawyer present, but you cannot be compelled to answer those questions, and you can still consult a lawyer for all interview questions.
> and you can still consult a lawyer for all interview questions.
This is simply not as straightforward as you're implying. Per the article, R v Sinclair established that in most cases, a detainee may be permitted to consult a lawyer only once.
Specifically, the case addresses two issues regarding the police's implementation duty under the right to counsel: 1) does a detainee have the right to have a lawyer present during police questioning, and 2) does a detainee have the right to make multiple phone calls to their lawyer. A majority of the Court answered the first question in the negative, and answered the second question in the negative, subject to a change of circumstances.
Hence… I politely asked if they meant to reply to someone else.
I don’t know why you’re talking about fighting.
You literally just echoed back something to someone that they already said. That’s more than a little confusing to a reader.
I provided the full link to Wikipedia, the summary of what R v Sinclair actually established (from which readers can immediately see that Canadian right to a lawyer during questioning differs sharply from the US right), and then the Wikipedia link which discusses the history and background of the case, the ruling, and further links to the text of the decision on CanLII, etc.
That's genuinely useful missing information, which many HN readers will not bother to search for, but if you provide the links some of them may actually click through, then we collectively get a less-misinformed discussion. If instead of suggesting I intended to respond to the wrong person, you had directly asked me why I thought it useful to post this, I'd have told you that it was so other posters would inform their discussion better; it's very tiring constantly seeing discussions where posters assume any legal question is asked about US law and only US law, or worse still, simply assume that US legal principles or rule of law apply all over the world (such as anything on Canadian law, or all the discussions on privacy law).
And one extra thing: you might be assuming that merely saying "R v Sinclair" is unambiguous without including the "(2010 SCC 35)" part of the citation, but when I personally google "R v Sinclair", most hits are relevant, but #7 hit is "People v. Sinclair, 131 A.D.3d 492" and #10 hit is "Sinclair v. Sinclair :: 1969 :: Kansas Supreme Court Decisions". As we've commented ongoing in HN, google search relevance is degrading these days, so don't assume incomplete citations lead users to the right article.
Posting a link (or archive reference) is a substantial contribution to a discussion, esp. when many of the posters haven't read the topic they're discussing.
I mean, you just wrote 4+ paragraphs on the topic(!) so writing "Here's the relevant bit for anyone interested..." is not a big ask.
I've been here for well over a decade and online for three decades - I was confused by the comment (and following the topic closely) so I asked. Take my feedback or don't. I don't care. But understand that it's slightly ambiguous and confusing for the reader. There are lots of trolls here and lots of genuinely well intentioned people (you included) but it's not always obvious which is which.
There's no reason to be so upset.
I'm not "upset", I'm merely ongoing perplexed that you believe that HN posts in general will necessarily disagree with the post they respond to. (This ain't Twitter, it's a fairly civilized fact-based discussion board). You can trivially infer whether I agree/disagree/partially agree simply by seeing my post interacts with the parent, GP and ancestor posts it's responding to).
> It wasn't clear to me ... [whether my post]... (a) contradicts, or (b) supports the argument being made.
?!? You had already actually said about my post "You seem to be in agreement. Perhaps you responded to the wrong person?".
So you, me and user @itsnotafight all figured my post was in support of naasking. And itsnotafight told you "[can...] even provide additional bolstering evidence — like a direct quote." Then you tried to disagree that my post provided additional bolstering evidence, although it did (for the reasons I've explained above).
You can instantly tell I'm a bona-fide commentator and not a troll from looking at my post history (just like I could tell from yours). In my fact my post history shows I often post explanatory/clarifying/supporting/disagreeing links.
My feedback to your feedback is you could have simply said "I'm confused by this post, can't tell if it's agreeing or disagreeing with the post it's responding to." That would have made it clearer, that it was only your confusion, the rest of us weren't confused by my intent. There was no wider confusion and you weren't speaking on behalf of anyone else.
> writing "Here's the relevant bit for anyone interested..." is not a big ask.
It totally is a big ask when requiring me to post a good-faith preamble of my bona fides, and moreover a context that notes that this is the umpteenth discussion where posters assumed US constitutional/legal principles apply in Canada (or elsewhere), or at minimum threw around undefined phrases and assumed they were universal. If we ever need to post a good-faith preamble plus a context to even a fairly self-evident short post, this discussion board has already been irredeemably overrun by trolls, and the good-faith posters will all simply leave.
> here are lots of trolls here and lots of genuinely well intentioned people...
I'm not going to armor-proof my posts purely to minimize some tiny Type-II error probability of users who misunderstand the context on my post and wrongly flag it. (I see tons of other posts daily on HN where I personally can't discern whether a response or a discussion is in good-faith, I usually refrain from judging and flagging if I can't determine that; most of those go way beyond being arguably slightly ambiguous and confusing for the reader).
I don't think it's constructive for us to prolong discussing this anymore. Other people are disagreeing that you had any reason to be confused about my intent. At absolute minimum I expect you would have posted "I'm confused by this post, can't tell if it's agreeing or disagreeing with the post it's responding to." Or, don't take my word for it, show this to ten people you know and trust and see how many of them say my comment was not a troll.
Look at all this energy that's been wasted when could have more productively been spent on Canadian vs US vs non-US principles on the right to silence. Oh well.
My wording was entirely correct.
> and also chose to ignore that whether a lawyer is present or not, you cannot be compelled to testify against yourself
Irrelevant to the point I was making, which was specifically about how our right to counsel differs from the US.
>In the United States, the Fifth Amendment permits a witness to refuse to answer any question that may incriminate them (a.k.a. “taking the fifth” or “pleading the fifth”). This is not how the law works in Canada. In Canada, a witness can be forced to answer incriminating questions.
https://www.aclrc.com/section-13#:~:text=In%20the%20United%2....
> As part of the bargain, however, the Crown cannot use that evidence to incriminate the witness in another proceeding.
It seems important since it still prevents one from self-incrimination in the context of the courts. Maybe there are other legal ramifications caused by this distinction but it sounds functionally equivalent.
>The Supreme Court discussed the relationship between the section 7 pre-trial right to silence and the confessions rule in Singh.90 That case involved a detained murder suspect who was interrogated by individuals he knew were police. In the course of the interrogation, Singh asserted his right to remain silent 18 times before ultimately responding to police questions with some self-incriminating statements. The defence objected to the admissibility of Singh’s statements on the basis that they were obtained in violation of his section 7 right to silence, but a slim majority of the Supreme Court rejected this argument. The majority held that, where a detainee is interrogated by known police, the section 7 right to silence is subsumed into the voluntariness inquiry.91 Since the trial judge had considered all the circumstances and determined that the statements were made voluntarily, the question whether the accused’s free will was overborne had already been answered and the section 7 right to silence could provide no further protection.92
Source(pdf): The Patchwork Principle against Self-Incrimination under the Charter https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?...
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/chec...
>There is no constitutional right to have a lawyer present throughout a police interview (Sinclair, supra at paragraphs 34-38). Rather, in most cases an initial warning, coupled with a reasonable opportunity to consult counsel when the detainee invokes the right to counsel, satisfies section 10(b) (Sinclair, supra at paragraph 2).
Edit: This is what I mean
>Unlike the U.S. Constitution’s right to counsel under the fifth amendment, neither section 10(b) of the Charter nor the right to counsel allowed by Supreme Court cases allows for your lawyer to be present with you during an interrogation. That means that after you’ve spoken to your lawyer it could be hours or days before you speak to them again and the police will take every opportunity they can to get a statement from you that seals your conviction.
>https://www.jeffreismanlaw.ca/understanding-your-right-to-co...
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/chec...
I don’t even know how you could force someone to testify against themselves. Seems like an unreliable witness…
>In Canada a person has the right not to have any incriminating evidence that the person was compelled to give in one proceeding used against him or her in another proceeding except in a prosecution for perjury or for the giving of contradictory evidence. Thus, in Canada, a witness cannot refuse to answer a question on the grounds of self-incrimination, but receives full evidentiary immunity in return. https://www.mpllp.com/no-right-to-remain-silent
It's silly that you need to request it, but there is a process to expunge your record.
As per https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/page-98.html#d...:
(4) However, if the Attorney General or counsel does not give notice under subsection (3) on or before the first anniversary of the day on which the stay of proceedings was entered, the proceedings are deemed never to have been commenced.
A fair question. First, as I was not making a top level comment, but responding to another comment, I was not specifically addressing this case, but instead making a broader statement about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (and the attendant judicial interpretations of same) versus the US Bill of Rights (and likewise legal interpretations). (Side note, a sibling comment thread makes the same argument).
In particular, Canadian courts have pretty consistently allowed more exceptions to the charters compared to US courts and Bill of Rights. Additionally, the charter makes much weaker protections in several specific circumstances, for example in section 24(2), whereby evidence collected illegally may still be used in criminal proceedings (see R v Grant 1990). But section 1 is the real kicker.
As a specific example, you referenced Section 9 of CRF. In R v Ladouceur [1], the Canadian Supreme Court found that although random traffic stops (fishing expeditions) violated Section 9 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, they were permitted under Section 1 of the Charter.
Section 1 contains the prefatory text:
"The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject *only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society*" (emphasis mine)
The fact that such weasel words / escape hatch would be enshrined into something that is purported to be as fundamental as the Bill of Rights essentially nullifies the entire thing, in my opinion. Indeed, section 1 is often quoted in Canadian jurisprudence as justification for all sorts of -- again, in my opinion -- government overreach.
Granted the way the article explained it is pretty poor. I'm not totally clear what it was trying to say in that regard.
As an aside, Canada has a robust pardon system[0] that the US doesn't have. At least aside from the truly bizarre (at least to me) system of presidential pardons.
A pardon wipes your record of the specific crime completely FWIW.