this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2026

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Assault charges dropped against Ontario man who confronted home intruder (www.cbc.ca)

submitted 1 day ago by DarylInCanada@lemmy.ca to c/canada@lemmy.ca

43 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hmmm. The article indicates a broken window, and further 'medical and forensic evidence'. If the broken window was the point of access, it might indicate that a lot of the cuts sustained by the alleged intruder could be traced to the broken glass. That fact would change the entire scenario. It then becomes 'much ado about nothing'.

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[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 5 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

The Crown dropped the case of their own accord after reviewing the additional evidence. He didn't have to defend himself in court.

Obviously that doesn't mean that no legal costs were incurred. We do have public defenders in Canada, so it's likely those costs were born by the state. If he did incur any out of pocket expenses I would certainly like to see him compensated for those. Unfortunately I'm not aware of what the specific law is on that matter.

But again, as I pointed out elsewhere, this is a very, very rare case. Normally cases for self-defence are never even brought to begin with. The Crown either fucked up very badly here, or they sincerely believed that they had a very strong case that this was not legitimate.

That can happen in any justice system. Unless you simply declare that all murder is legal, there is absolutely no version of a self-defence exemption that will not sometimes be wrongly prosecuted. The question here is not whether or not the prosecuters were right to bring the case, it's whether or not Canada's legal self-defence standard makes sense. And given a choice between what we have, which works extremely well, and very rarely produces outlier results like this (remember, you never hear about the self-defence incidents that don't get prosecuted) and a system where cleaners get shot for knocking at the wrong house, I think the choice is clear.

[–] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 1 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

There's a few ways I would like to take this but also I think overall I agree with you.

I don't go into it to much but where I'm slowly adapting my views are on a few issues.

One is that I think one is that no cost should be incurred by anyone who defended themselves. I do totally get the argument that everybody deserves justice including criminals. But the stories I've come across tend to highlight how self defense laws are lacking in Canada and there is a lot of room between allowing all killings and some kind of castle doctrine.

The second issue for me is as I've aged, I can't tell you what the hell police do. The amount of times myself or someone i know has called them, only for them to say "not much we can do, just file a report online" is too many. Yet majority of my municipal taxes go to them. So for me I am coming around to the idea that we need to pull back some of the responsibility society has given to police and reclaim it ourselves. They're not keeping us safe. They are now refusing to act when the government tells them to. Because of this I think society does need to go back to the idea that we can't rely on the justice system.

[–] DarylInCanada@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

The amount of times myself or someone i know has called them, only for them to say “not much we can do, just file a report online”

Exactly how high do you want your taxes to go? Complete coverage for all o the calls would be prohibitively expensive, and I suspect you would be one of the first people to protest your high taxes.

[–] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago

If they cannot provide this basic service then we as the public need to the law in our own hands. The entier reason we do not is we entrust that to police. But they no longer serve. They are there to increase their budget and militarize themselves to protect only certain people.

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 1 points 18 hours ago

But the stories I’ve come across tend to highlight how self defense laws are lacking in Canada

Here's the thing. I hear this a lot. And every single time that I've ever been presented with an example, and looked into it deep enough, or enough time has passed that more information came to light, every obvious case of Canada's self-defence laws "failing" has always turned out to be "No, actually, in this case there really was a line crossed."

That's not to say that no law can ever fail. Laws do get misapplied, and no law is perfect. There are edge cases where people will simply disagree; that happens a lot with the law. There are entire fields of academia basically devoted to disagreeing about laws. But it is remarkable that I have never yet seen even one clear cut case of "Wow, that guy totally did not deserve to get charged with anything, he was clearly just defending himself," that didn't turn out to be something far more ambiguous, if not outright damning to the defendant when the details are known.