Self-Induced Extreme Intoxication: Brown and Section 33.1 of the Criminal Code
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Parliament enacted section 33.1 of the Criminal Code in 1995, in direct response to the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1994 decision in R. v. Daviault. Through this provision, it set out to remove the reach of the extreme intoxication defence from accused persons charged with personal violence offences, where their intoxication was self-induced. Parliament justified the imposition of criminal responsibility in these cases on the moral blameworthiness of voluntary intoxication, notwithstanding the majority’s ruling in Daviault that doing so offends the Charter. It was not until 2021 — more than 25 years after the enactment of section 33.1 — that the Charter issue came before the Court for hearing. In the much-anticipated case of R. v. Brown, the Court ruled that section 33.1 violates sections 7 and 11(d) and is not saved by section 1. Remarkably, just 25 days after the Brown decision was handed down, Parliament enacted a new section 33.1 in an effort to once again to limit the availability of the extreme intoxication defence. On this occasion, however, Parliament’s efforts were guided — and its ambitions tempered — by the Court’s clear articulation in Brown of minimum Charter requirements. This paper offers a summary of the Brown ruling. It then describes the constituent parts of the new section 33.1 and attempts to construct an analytical framework for the provision’s application in future cases. It concludes with a discussion of legal, evidentiary and practical issues that counsel and courts might soon encounter in those cases where the extreme intoxication defence is advanced, not least of which is concern about the differential treatment of accused persons based on intoxication symptoms.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".