Anyone wanna do it with me?
Code:
Case Brief Assignment
Value: 15%
The Assignment
For this assignment you must do a case brief for one of two cases (see below). Remember the purpose of this assignment is to learn how to take a whole case and summarize or “brief” the case. This means you will have to break the case down into the headings we discussed in class (Facts, Issues, Decision, Reasons, Ratio). This brief should be single-spaced and should be no more than 1 ½ pages long (you should be able to do the brief in only one page).
This assignment is not designed to require you to learn all about the legal issues in the case; you only need to know enough of the law to understand what is going on. Again, you are simply summarizing the case; you aren’t being expected to offer any commentary or do any analysis.
The two cases you can choose from are:
R. v. McSorley (2000)(Provincial Court of B.C.) (Reasons for decision, NOT reasons for sentence)
R. v. Sansregret (1985)(Supreme Court of Canada)
These are both criminal cases. The McSorley case involves a charge of assault with a weapon. The Sansregret case involves a charge of sexual assault. While the two cases are quite different in terms of the type of assault, they are both assault cases broadly speaking.
The McSorley case is a trial decision of a lower court; the Sansregret case is an appeal decision from the highest court in the country. While the nature of the cases is somewhat different (with one being an appeal decision and the other not) the object of the case brief is the same: summarize the case in a way that allows you to easily remember the relevant facts and issues of the case, the ultimate decision, the reasons for the decision, and the basic principle of law that emerges from the case.
Background to the Assignment – the Law of Assault and Sexual Assault
Assault is defined as the intentional application of force to another person without the other person’s consent. So key issues that arise in many assault cases relate to “intention” and “consent”; to get a conviction the Crown must prove BOTH that the application of force was intentional AND that there was no consent by the victim (to the use of force). Consequently an accused in an assault case will often raise defence arguments in relation to intent (“I didn’t intend to apply force to the other person”) or consent (“the other person consented to me applying force to them”).
The difference between sexual assault and other forms of assault is that the “application of force” is of a sexual nature. Most of the time whether the force is of a sexual nature is obvious (and this explains why the Crown chose to charge with sexual assault rather than some other form of assault).
Consent will sometimes be the focal point in an assault case. This is more common in sexual assault cases where the accused person will say that the alleged victim consented to the sexual activity in question. If this is true, then there is no sexual assault (because there can’t be any kind of assault where one person consents to the force being used against them). While consent is more commonly raised in sexual assault cases, it is sometimes raised in other assault cases as well – such as assault cases involving the application of force in the context of a sporting event, where the argument is that the victim consented to some amount of force being used against them because it is “just part of the game”.
It is important to note that an accused cannot be convicted where they “honestly but mistakenly” believed there was consent. So an accused will be acquitted where there is actual consent, but can also be acquitted where there is not actual consent but where the accused honestly thought there was consent. As you might imagine, this idea is particularly controversial in sexual assault cases – the result is that the courts have been very strict when considering “honest mistake of fact (regarding consent)” arguments and only accept them in the rarest of circumstances. Generally if there is even the slightest evidence of lack of consent (such as a woman saying “I have a boyfriend” or “I’m tired” when a sexual advance is made) a court will conclude there has been no consent.
