Episode 4: R. v. Stevenson
Thomas Stevenson v. His Majesty the King
Years after a restaurant was robbed by two masked assailants, an unsavoury witness, or rather, a witness that required a Vetrovec caution at trial, came forward to police and identified the appellant as one of the masked robbers. Until then, the case had remained unsolved for years. The trial judge convicted the appellant, relying almost solely on the identification of the appellant by the unsavoury witness. Because the robbery was captured on video surveillance, the trial judge reasoned that there were points of corroboration between the video and the witness testimony, even though both assailants were completely masked.
The Court of Appeal agreed with the trial judge, and found that because the trial judge dutifully reasoned why the Vetrovec concerns did not outweigh the weight of the identification evidence, the conviction was sound. The dissenting judge disagreed however, and opined that appellant intervention was required due to the error in law committed by the trial judge when considering the inherent dangers in the unsavoury witnesses’ evidence. The dissenting judge would have ordered a new trial.