[valo403]

Originally Posted by flylock shox

There are arguments both ways here. It ultimately comes down to how the balance should be struck between protecting the rights of individuals, and empowering police to solve crimes. Society has an enormous interest in both.

To suggest that the current state of the law (as supported by this ruling) allows police to abuse their investigative powers by coercing or forcing confessions is not accurate however. From the headnotes of the majority decision in Sinclair:



Nage has suggested that an innocent person would have nothing to fear from a police interrogation. This is not entirely true in the broad sense, but it is much more reasonable in the more narrow context of police interviews in Canada with the current state of the law as described in this decision.

For example, how would the police get a confession from someone who is innocent? It's hard to imagine any circumstance in which they could do so without violating the confessions rule, i.e., coercion, inducement, or a witness operating under some mental impairment. So the danger of a false conviction is not as great as some might make it out to be.

By contrast, how would the police get a confession from someone who is guilty? That can be done without coercion, inducement, or an impaired mental state. It could simply emerge from the types of investigative questioning techniques that were used in these companion cases. In short, good strategies for probing witnesses and obtaining information from them without violating the confessions rule.

So the balance the SCC has struck here allows for police interrogation because there are existing protections in the law relating to how those interrogations must be conducted - protections that are more likely to protect the innocent, and less likely to protect the guilty.

Edit: Didn't see your posts on the next page.