Simon's Legal Resources

Jurisdiction - Failure to Consider Evidence

. R. v. Brown

In R. v. Brown (Ont CA, 2026) the Ontario Court of Appeal held that when a preliminary hearing judge failed "to consider the totality of the evidence" they committed a jurisdictional error:

[6] .... the reviewing judge was entitled to find that in this case the preliminary inquiry judge had committed a jurisdictional error by failing to consider the totality of the evidence. In the course of her decision, the preliminary inquiry judge referred to “the mere fact of having keys to an apartment”, as if the possession of a key was the only evidence of Mr. Brown’s control and access to the apartment, when it was not. And her finding that there was no evidence before her connecting Mr. Brown to the sixth-floor unit was flatly inconsistent with evidence that she failed to address. Significantly, she made no mention in her decision of Mr. Brown’s statement that the key that was used to open the sixth‑floor unit was to “his unit”, or to the surveillance evidence that had tracked him to the sixth floor and circumstantially placed him in the sixth-floor unit throughout the night before. These circumstances strongly suggest that the preliminary inquiry judge failed to consider material and important evidence in coming to the decision that she did and thereby failed to exercise the jurisdiction she was assigned.