I am kept quite busy in Toronto and other regions of Ontario defending a wide variety of criminal charges, from bail hearings to trials to appeals to applications for the return of seized property.

Nonetheless, I have expanded my practice into the area of civil litigation for lawsuits against the police/authorities in certain cases. Why?

I still often think about the acquittal I secured in 1999 for an innocent man, Jason Hill, on what was once alleged to be a ‘series’ of bank robberies. He had been previously convicted in a trial that was overturned on appeal after he spent more than 20 months in jail. After we secured his acquittal at the criminal trial, he sued police and took the matter all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, ^[1] with the representation of expert civil counsel (not myself). In the result the highest court recognized for in 2007 that police can be sued for negligent investigation.

This result, and the principle it enshrined in law, are gifts to freedom and democracy. But a reading of the Supreme Court’s judgment, and the cases that have followed, show that it is still very hard to hold authorities civilly accountable.

My office therefore considers retainers for civil lawsuits in matters where I have been involved in the criminal defence from which the claim arises. One of the reasons people are often unable to initiate such claims is that the civil lawyer must start ‘from scratch’. That alone can make a lawsuit financially non-viable. Bridging the gap between criminal defence and civil prosecution is my response to that fact that when things go terribly wrong for the innocent, official misconduct ranging from negligence to outright criminality has historically gone largely unpunished.