The Frayed and Tarnished Silver Thread: Stinchcome and the Role of Crown Counsel in Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Supreme Court of Canada has repeatedly stressed that, in their roles as Crown prosecutors, Crown counsel must act as ministers of justice in order to protect against wrongful convictions. Historically this obligation has been referred to as a silver thread woven into "the web of Canadian criminal law." Central to this quasi-judicial Crown obligation is disclosure. In this article, the author contends that the Supreme Court ideal of Crown prosecutors acting as ministers of justice and making full disclosure does not correspond with reality. Rather, it is asserted that the Crown delegates disclosure duties to the police, does not take disclosure obligations seriously, and is not held responsible by the courts for failure to disclose. The author argues that until the Supreme Court clarifies the required scope of disclosure, especially as regards Charter defences; until Crown prosecution offices are prepared and equipped to take the disclosure role seriously; and until the courts enforce this role; there will continue to be wrongful convictions due to lack of disclosure.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".