New dynamic in the courtroom
Good morning. I’m Karen Pauls, a senior reporter covering this trial in London, Ont.
The dynamic in the courtroom has changed since the judge dismissed the jury last week. Ontario Superior Court Justice Maria Carroccia will decide the case now.
Lisa Dufraimont, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto, doesn’t think the prosecution or defence will change their strategies because the issue of consent remains the same “and the evidence that’s relevant to that is still relevant whether the case is being tried by a judge or by a jury.”
Still, I was curious to know if there’s a perceived advantage to either side with a judge-only trial.
Dufraimont says there’s very little solid research on jury decision-making in Canada, but “one intuition that people tend to have is that juries are probably more lenient in criminal cases generally … that it likely favours the defence to have a jury in many cases.”
The five accused men have now given up their right to a jury trial to avoid a second mistrial, something Dufraimont says was a “reasonable solution” in everyone’s best interests.
But she says it’s not the ideal scenario because the jury acts as the “conscience” of the community.
“It’s because this is such an important court case that Canadians are watching that it would have been important to have a jury decide the case and bring that sort of community view to the decision,” she says. “That’s been lost and that is unfortunate.”
Because everyone ultimately agreed to a judge-alone trial, Dufraimont doesn’t see that being the basis of an appeal by either side.