When the Supreme Court said trial judges should do their part to reduce delay in the justice system, it wasn’t suggesting what Justice Richard Blouin did in a 2017 criminal case, an appeal court has ruled. He cited the Cody decision, which reiterates much of what the Supreme Court said in its landmark R v. Jordan decision in 2016. By commenting on trial judges managing trials, the Supreme Court was referring to the streamlining of motions and applications before and during the trial to avoid delay, Akhtar said. “The paragraph relied upon by the trial judge and the sentence he emphasized hardly signalled a system by which a trial judge could ‘short circuit’ a trial even though there was further evidence to be called, and submissions to be made, simply because he or she thought they had ‘heard enough,’” Akhtar wrote. “Here, the trial judge’s intervention made the trial more efficient but at an unacceptable cost: it undermined the defendant’s right to be heard.”
Source: thestar May 11, 2018 21:11 UTC