Henry v British Columbia: Still Seeking a Just Approach to Damages for Wrongful Conviction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Henry v. British Columbia (Attorney General) was the first case in which a claimant sought damages under section 24(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms for breaches of rights that led to a wrongful conviction and imprisonment. In its 2015 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada clarified the criteria for the award and quantum of such damages. In June 2016, Hinkson C.J.S.C. awarded $8,086,691.80 in damages to Ivan Henry in compensation, special damages and “to serve both the vindication and deterrence functions of s. 24(1) of the Charter”. This award reflected Hinkson C.J.S.C.’s findings that: Crown Counsel intentionally withheld relevant information from Henry in breach of his Charter rights; the wrongful non-disclosure seriously infringed Henry’s Charter rights; and if Henry had received the disclosure “the likely result would have been his acquittal at his 1983 trial, and certainly the avoidance of his sentencing as a dangerous offender.” In this article, I describe the events that led to Ivan Henry’s civil case against British Columbia, and explain the interlocutory decisions that shaped the passage of that civil case. I attend particularly to two difficult issues: the role of demonstrable factual innocence in a trial for Charter damages; and the challenges of affording constitutional rights to sexual assault complainants in a civil case that arises from wrongful conviction. Ultimately, I suggest that the Henry case illustrates the inadequacies in the Canadian approach to post-conviction review and compensation for wrongful convictions. In lieu of the adversarial process adopted in Henry, inquiries such as the one conducted by Justice Peter Cory in the Sophonow case offer a model that holds greater potential for doing justice to those whose lives and rights may be affected by a wrongful conviction.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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".