Two and a half years after Norman Tate’s son was killed in a car accident, he’s still struggling to come to terms with how the justice system handled the aftermath.
“If you step forward inside that place, you’re flipping a coin — whether you’re going to get justice that day or not,” he said on April 30, standing outside the Ontario Court of Justice in Brantford, Ont.
Norman Tate Junior was killed in a head-on collision a week before Christmas in 2021. The driver in the other car eventually was charged with impaired driving causing death and bodily harm. But the case crawled through the court system and was stayed after it breached the time limits for trials set in a 2016 Supreme Court decision.
That decision in R. v. Jordan established that criminal cases that go beyond those time limits — 18 months for provincial courts and 30 months for superior courts — can be stayed for unreasonable delay.
Having a solid justice system is important, because if you don’t, you start hearing the argument that police brutality isn’t a bad thing because it’s the only way offenders get punished. (Sadly, I have heard this argument from people who should know better.)