A Lifeline During Custodial Interrogations? The Right to Counsel and Reflections on R. v. Dussault and R. v. Lafrance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2022, the Supreme Court of Canada issued two judgments with respect to the constitutional right to counsel: R. v. Dussault and R. v. Lafrance. This right is located in section 10(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Specifically, both decisions concern an accused’s right to reconsult counsel in the context of custodial police interrogations. Further to earlier Supreme Court jurisprudence regarding an individual’s constitutional right to counsel, an accused is permitted to consult a lawyer prior to police questioning. Police must refrain from questioning the individual until that individual has had an opportunity to consult a lawyer. However, having consulted a lawyer, an accused is not entitled to have counsel present during questioning. Nevertheless, the Court has held that, in certain contexts, an accused may be permitted to reconsult counsel once an interrogation has commenced and where there is reason to question the detainee’s understanding of their rights. In Dussault and Lafrance, the Court rightly concluded that the two accused individuals were entitled to reconsult their lawyers after the interrogations commenced and police interrogators failed to provide them with this opportunity. While agreeing with the Court’s conclusions in these judgments, the author argues that these cases illustrate the importance of having a right to have counsel present during such interrogations. The right to reconsult counsel is contingent on police interrogators perceiving these changed circumstances, which many may be unwilling to see, particularly while in hot pursuit of a confession. The right to have a lawyer present would enable an accused to have access to advice in real time without having to rely on an interrogator to properly register such changed circumstances. In acknowledging a right to have counsel present, the Court would be recognizing a broader vision of counsel serving as a lifeline during custodial interrogations. The ability to have counsel present would require the Court to revisit its earlier jurisprudence from 2010, including the decisions in R. v. Sinclair and R. v. McCrimmon.
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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 | 0.024 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.038 | 0.028 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".