I just want to talk to you today a very general way about the basic defences to an impaired driving, DUI or over 80 case by the way, everyone says DUI is actually not a Ontario Canadian care we kind of borrow the US that everyone uses so you should occasionally in my videos. So, at its simplest I’ll just be very general in this video because I could go on for hours literally there’s so many to be hundreds of sub topics we’re going to talk about, but the bottom line is, defences can break down in various areas. One is essentially police errors. It’s a very technical area of DUI law. The police often make errors in the manner in which they collect evidence for example, and in which they process the arrest problems with the arrest are reasonable probable grounds for example. This is what’s called a Charter issue. You have rights here to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Now, a very another very fertile ground is a breach of the rights to counsel. This happens all the time in impaired and over 80 cases. And it results in exclusion of evidence where the breath samples are thrown out where statements are thrown down, etc. The setup of the Intoxilyzer is a very fertile area. What happens to the breath room once I get the grasp of video, I’m able to see if they set up the Intoxilyzer properly. I’m a breath tech technician myself, I studied the case law as well as a qualified breath technician. So, I can determine if they’ve made an error in this regard hadn’t been processed are the rights correctly done in all stages in the midst of the trial, even when we don’t necessarily see something on paper when I get the disclosures. Look, they look like they’ve done everything correctly. Well, what happens a significant amount of time is at trial is the prosecutor makes a mistake or the police officer makes mistake in describing the evidence in introducing the paperwork and not producing the correct paperwork etc. So, there’s all sorts of technical issues they break down to police errors, essentially, spontaneous errors in court, constitutional rights breaches and problems with the Intoxilyzer or problems with the approved screening device. There’s also defences in the sense for impaired driving for example, where you know, the police have described a manner of driving a manner of speech being slurred and manner of walking being unbalanced, where there’s valid explanations for those and to use an extreme example, maybe someone’s got a speech impediment constantly. Maybe they had one beer, they got an odor of alcohol, they slur normally. They’ve got a, you know, artificial leg and they the police didn’t know that and we just give me an extreme example. But there’s many examples where you can win these cases based on voice visual evidence, technical evidence, constitutional rights, the police making mistakes during the arrest, and ultimately, you know, the crown or the police making a spontaneous error in court and it’s always shocking to me how often that occurs because I plan to go to trial and all these other issues, I filed a chair application I found a race to council application original public application. Oh, we get to trial we have a two-day trial it doesn’t go well. We lose on those things and go I say to the client, well, we’ve got another half day we hope something arises but it probably won’t. Police officer makes mistake or the crown makes mistake and that they don’t file the you know the evidence of when the when the solution was last tested or that’s been certified by the ministry by a tester. This happens all the time. It’s shocking to me how often it happens to me 30 years ago and used to happen on almost every case, they’re better trained now both the Crowns and police but it still happens so there’s a multitude of defense, there’s books written they go over 1000s of pages about this within each one of those subtopics there’s literally 100 topics that I can, but I won’t get into that I just wanted to give you a brief overview of the basic defences and ways that these cases can be won if the defences are successful.
