Bill C-14: A Step Backwards for the Rights of Mentally Disordered Offenders in the Canadian Criminal Justice System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Canadian criminal justice system has long grappled with those who commit criminal acts while suffering from a mental disorder. As stated by Justice McLachlin (as she then was) in Winko v British Columbia (Forensic Psychiatric Institute) (“Winko”), “[i]n every society there are those who commit criminal acts because of mental illness. The criminal law must find a way to deal with these people fairly, while protecting the public against further harms. The task is not an easy one.”1 The task has certainly not been an easy one to date with lawmakers struggling to strike the appropriate balance between protecting the public and respecting the liberty of mentally disordered offenders. In 1992, this balance was achieved with the disposition scheme for offenders found not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder (NCRMD). Unfortunately, Bill C-14 will change the existing regime and could negatively impact both the criminal justice and the mental health system.2 This paper will outline the origins of the mental disorder defence in Canada, examine how the NCRMD scheme currently operates, discuss a recent case involving a NCRMD accused, and finally analyze the proposed amendments. Sensationalistic cases involving mentally disordered offenders combined with a lack of understanding by the public as to how the mental disorder defence operates have caused the current government to push for unnecessary and unconstitutional amendments to the NCRMD regime.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".