A common question I am often asked by clients is whether a victim of an assault can drop a charge. I cover a similar topic regarding domestic assault victims and the short answer to the domestic assault is basically no. It’s a little more complicated with general assault charges that don’t involve a domestic victim. So let’s take a bar fight for example and the complainant, the victim eventually goes to the Crown and says look I don’t want to proceed with the charges. Well you see even in this situation it’s not really up to the victim, also called the complainant. The Crown Attorney is the one in charge of the charges. They are in charge of the prosecution. Now they might listen to the person in certain circumstances. Maybe it’s a very minor incident involving no injuries and the person psychologically doesn’t want to proceed. The Crown might consider it in that case but if there’s serious injuries and there’s other witnesses they might not do it. It’s not quite astringent as domestic assaults, there’s a little bit more play in this. For example, the person if they are psychologically unable to testify the Crown would you know, that’s going to harm their psyche by going on the stand, they might withdraw it. So it’s more of a complicated answer but don’t think if you are the victim of a crime you just go to the Crown and drop the charge. It’s not quite that easy and the Crown Attorney’s going to weigh a lot of factors as to whether it actually happens.
