Daviault Dialogue: The Strange Journey of Canada's Intoxication Defence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
EnglishIn 1994, the Supreme Court of Canada found that Henri Daviault had unconstitutionally been denied the defence of being so intoxicated that he could not form the minimal intent necessary to commit sexual assault. In response, Parliament swiftly amended the Criminal Code to disallow the defence of extreme intoxication for violent crimes. It did so without using the Charter's section 33 notwithstanding clause. This set the stage for a subsequent, look case pitting the Court's Daviault judgment against Parliament's modification of it by ordinary statutory means. That two decades have gone by without this issue being clearly addressed by the Supreme Court has puzzled many observers. One explanation for the puzzle is that direct second looks have, for a variety of reasons, thus far stalled in the lower courts. A second explanation may lie in strategic behaviour by the Supreme Court, which has arguably decided the constitutional issue indirectly (and with little fanfare) under the guise of statutory interpretation. francaisEn 1994, la Cour supreme du Canada conclut que Henri Daviault avait inconstitutionnellement ete refuse le moyen de defense d'avoir ete dans un etat d'ebriete si avance qu'il ne pouvait pas former l'intention minimale requise pour commettre une agression sexuelle. En reponse, le Parlement modifia promptement le Code criminel afin de rejeter le moyen de defense de l'etat d'intoxication extreme pour les crimes violents. Il le fit sans avoir recours a la disposition de derogation de l'article 33 de la Charte. Ceci prepara le terrain pour une cause de reexamen ulterieure opposant le jugement Daviault de la Cour a la modification de celui-ci par le Parlement a l'aide de moyens legislatifs ordinaires. Le fait que deux decennies se sont ecoulees sans que la Cour supreme aborde clairement cette question a laisse perplexe de nombreux observateurs. Une explication de ce mystere est que les reexamens directs sont jusqu'ici restes, pour diverses raisons, au point mort dans les tribunaux inferieurs. Une deuxieme explication pourrait resider dans le comportement strategique de la Cour supreme qui, on peut soutenir, trancha la question constitutionnelle indirectement (et sans fanfare) sous couvert d' interpretation legislative.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.057 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.021 | 0.022 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".