On The Wire

The Surrey Six: A New Test for Summary Dismissal Applications

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that a motion in a criminal proceeding may only be summarily dismissed if it is manifestly frivolous. In a unanimous opinion in the notorious Surrey Six murder case an eight member panel held that this new threshold will best preserve fair trials and ...
Continue Reading
/

The Story of Tammy Bouvette

Marginalized, overwhelmed and intellectually challenged. That is how three Canadian judges described a woman who accepted a powerful inducement held out by the state when she pleaded guilty ten years ago to causing the death of a child in her care by criminal negligence. It was a better bet than ...
Continue Reading
/

The Seizure of Genesis Market

An international law enforcement operation involving seventeen countries has shut down a notorious online purveyor of stolen identities. The worldwide cyber investigation seized the infrastructure of Genesis Market in another blow to the cybercrime ecosystem. The dismantling of the user friendly site that offered access to data stolen from 1.5 ...
Continue Reading
/

A Russian Spy and the Arrest of Evan Gershkovich

Brazilian citizen Victor Muller Ferreira was ecstatic when he received his student visa. "Man, I got it," he said in an electronic message. "Now we are in the big-boys league." But Ferreira wasn't his real name and he wasn't from Brazil. He was Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov, a Russian spy originally ...
Continue Reading
/

What Is a Drug Courier?

The use of human carriers for drug trafficking is hidden in obscurity. The evidence about drug couriers is largely drawn from official sources such as law enforcement, customs authorities and court records that collectively reveal a narrow perspective of the global drug market. Definitions of the drug courier tend to ...
Continue Reading
/

Canada’s Supreme Court Returns to the Plain View Doctrine

What does the law of search and seizure say the result should be when a warrant authorizes the search of a digital device for evidence of a specified crime but the police find evidence of another crime when the warrant is executed? What is the distinction between the seizure of ...
Continue Reading
/

Russian Cybersecurity Expert Convicted in Hack-to-Trade Conspiracy

On February 14, 2023, a federal jury in Boston, Massachusetts, convicted Russian businessman, Vladislav Klyushin, of participating in an elaborate hack-to-trade conspiracy that netted millions through securities trades based on nonpublic information stolen from U.S. computer networks. Mr. Klyushin, whose company boasted of ties to the Kremlin, was arrested two ...
Continue Reading
/

The King of Crypto and the FTX Collapse

On December 12, 2022, billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested at his apartment complex in Nassau, Bahamas, after criminal charges were filed in New York. It was a dramatic fall for the founder and CEO of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange that saw his $32 billion company plunge into bankruptcy. The day ...
Continue Reading
/

Supreme Court of Canada Strikes Down Mandatory Jail for Gun Offence

The phrase illegal and cruel punishments was first used by the United Kingdom Parliament in the Bill of Rights 1689 and later adopted in the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States 1791 as cruel and unusual punishments. Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 ...
Continue Reading
/

Plea Bargaining: An Alberta Trilogy

Plea bargaining is not only commonplace but essential to the administration of the Canadian criminal justice system. In the modern practice of criminal law the bargain is called a joint submission when the prosecutor and defence counsel agree on a guilty plea and also agree to recommend a particular sentence ...
Continue Reading
/