Steve Coughlan

Thoroughly revised and updated, The Anatomy of Criminal Procedure is a general reference book on Canadian criminal procedure. It covers the major steps of the criminal process in rough sequence. These include, but are not limited to, search and seizure, detention and arrest, bail, disclosure and production, pre-trial motions, jury selection, appeals, and sentencing. This book presents the law visually with a series of approximately 75 charts and diagrams. Each of these are accompanied by a set of annotations that summarize the specific legal provisions and case law applicable to each step of individual criminal processes. Legal experts Steve Coughlan and Alex Gorlewski bridge the gap between conventional legal textbooks and annotated Criminal Codes through an indispensable format containing a dynamic combination of charts, diagrams, and written commentary beneficial for all types of learners. This edition introduces brand new sections on pleas, record suspensions, victim surcharges, and conditional sentences and offers a step-by-step guide to the real-world applications of current criminal procedure. Whether used as a standalone or alongside traditional legal texts, The Anatomy of Criminal Procedure is an essential companion for practitioners and students seeking a more intelligible and accessible understanding of Canadian criminal procedure.

Now in its fifth edition, this foundational textbook provides an overview of the rules of criminal procedure, from the preliminary issue of its sources to the rules governing appeals. Legal expert Steve Coughlan provides an in-depth discussion of police powers, with a major focus on the ever-expanding domain of search and seizure, as well as consideration of general warrants, powers of detention, arrest, and other methods of compelling appearance. The consideration of the pre-trial process looks at changes around preliminary inquiries, the most recent case law on issues of disclosure and production, and the state of flux the law continues to be in around jury selection. The chapter on the trial process includes discussion of the rules around information and indictments, pleas, and trial procedures such as addresses by counsel, publication bans, jury deliberations, and a trial judge’s case management power. Finally, the many issues arising on appeals are considered, including appeals by both the Crown and the accused, with discussion of the various grounds and the curative proviso. Ensuring a complete understanding of all aspects of the Canadian criminal process, this book will be of great relevance for students, educators, practitioners, and judges alike.

The criminal justice system aims to maintain a balance between the individual interest of private citizens to carry on their lives free from state interference, and the communal interest in maintaining a safe society. These two goals come into conflict with each other most visibly when agents of the state take control of private citizens -- that is, when they exercise their powers to detain or to arrest. The book focuses on "street-level" encounters: detentions and arrests that occur in the course of investigating crime and laying charges. The authors explore the initial interaction between agents of the state or others authorized to detain and arrest, and the private citizens whose liberty is interfered with. It is at that point that the balance between societal safety and individual liberty is most keenly in play. This third edition has been updated to incorporate significant statutory changes to Part XVI of the Criminal Code (Compelling Appearance of Accused Before a Justice and Interim Release), to common law powers (powers of detention, safety searches, search incident to arrest, etc.), to developments in the law in dealing with racial profiling, and to Charter rights (freedom from arbitrary detention, right to counsel, and so on).

This book sets out and examines the law governing criminal procedure in Canada. It explains the body of rules and principles that govern the investigation, prosecution, and adjudication of any offence enacted by Parliament for which an accused person would have a criminal record if found guilty by a court exercising jurisdiction under the Criminal Code. These include such things as police powers to search, detain, or arrest; the right to counsel; interim release; disclosure and production; informations and indictments; jury selection and deliberation; trial within a reasonable time; and appeals. This fourth edition updates the law in all areas of criminal procedure. Most notably, it incorporates significant discussion of Bill C-75, which has made changes to a great many areas of the Criminal Code, including powers of arrest, preliminary inquiries, and the jury selection process. In addition, it includes discussion of significant new Supreme Court of Canada cases, such as Le on arbitrary detention and racial profiling; Fleming v Ontario on powers of arrest; Saeed on search incident to arrest; Marakah, Jones, Reeves, and Mills on reasonable expectation of privacy; Antic on bail; and Jordan, Cody, and KJM on trial within a reasonable time.

Criminal law is a powerful legal tool in Canadian society consisting of numerous procedural rules but little organization. Provisions of the Criminal Code that are directly relevant to each other are often separated by many different (and usually irrelevant) sections and subsections. The common law rules of criminal procedure, meanwhile, are often established incrementally, in numerous cases decided over a long period of time. With both the Code and common law, it can be difficult and time-consuming to assemble and explain the entire legal framework governing a particular police power or court procedure. This deficiency in the law is what led authors Steve Coughlan and Alex Gorlewski to create a comprehensible resource that clarifies the relationships among the individual statutory provisions and the common law rules of criminal procedure. The Anatomy of Criminal Procedure: A Visual Guide to the Law illustrates the law of criminal procedure through nearly seventy annotated charts and diagrams. Across the whole criminal process -- from search and seizure to appeals and sentencing -- this book consolidates the statutory and common law rules around each step, visually depicts how they fit together, and explains in detailed annotations how the rules work and have been interpreted by courts. This is a valuable text for practitioners who work with the criminal process every day, as well as for students learning it for the first time. Coughlan and Gorlewski aim to outline the law as it was created and implemented by our institutions, while providing the coherence it sometimes lacks yet certainly requires.