The Availability of the Common Law Defence of Duress to Principals Charged with Murder: An Analysis of the Conflicting Appellate Decisions in R v Willis (TAW) and R v Aravena
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The topic of whether an accused charged as a party to murder can access the common law defence of duress has been a controversial subject in Canada. Unlike in Britain where the House of Lords in R v Howe categorically decided to deny the common law defence to all parties to the offence of murder, the law in Canada has been more hospitable to offenders charged with murder. Aiders and abettors and those charged under the common intention provisions of the Criminal Code of Canada are given access to the defence. The question of whether a principal to murder has access to the common law defence of duress has not yet been decided by the Supreme Court of Canada. In R v Aravena, the Court of Appeal for Ontario was inclined to the view that the defence be extended to principals to murder to give effect to the Charter principle of moral involuntariness. However, in a subsequent decision, R v Willis (TAW), the Court of Appeal for Manitoba refused to follow Aravena, finding that the denial of the common law defence of duress to principals to murder, as provided for in s. 17 of the Criminal Code, was constitutional, based on a proper understanding and application of the principle of moral involuntariness. The Supreme Court of Canada refused leave from the decisions in both Aravena and Willis, leaving the law of duress confused and unsettled as between these two appellate decisions. In this article, it will be argued that there are five reasons to prefer the holding in Aravena to the holding in Willis.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".