In Canada, we regularly incarcerate accused persons while they are still legally innocent. By the turn of the century, the growing number of accused held in pre-sentence custody had become a concern for provincial/territorial governments, and, by extension, the federal government. In an effort to address the problem, Bill C-25 - ‘The Truth in Sentencing Act’ - was passed into law. Adopting a quantitative as well as qualitative methodology, this study uses a randomly selected sample of 110 cases to examine the implementation of Bill C-25 as a case study of how Canadian judges respond to legislation which likely created friction between the political and judicial social spheres. Analyses suggest that there is strong evidence to support the notion that judges did not fully implement the legislation as intended by the federal government. Instead, it appears that judges may have been motivated to resist the implementation of Bill C-25 in order to protect fundamental principles of justice that were ignored in the drafting of the new law.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/34943 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Gallant, Benjamin |
| Contributors | Webster, Cheryl Marie |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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