Background
Marijana Ruzic was 21-year-old Yugoslavian who lived in Belgrade with her mother. A man had threatened to harm her unless she assisted him by smuggling heroin into Canada. The man stalked her for some time and began threatening her, eventually escalating to violent assaults. Ruzic eventually complied and flew to Canada. She was arrested at Toronto Pearson International Airport for importing heroin.
Yugoslavia was a country in Southeastern and Central Europe for most of the 20th century. It came into existence after World War I in 1918 under the name of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by the merger of the provisional State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs with the Kingdom of Serbia, and constituted the first union of the South Slavic people as a sovereign state, following centuries in which the region had been part of the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary. Peter I of Serbia was its first sovereign. The kingdom gained international recognition on 13 July 1922 at the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris. The official name of the state was changed to Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 3 October 1929.
Belgrade is the capital and largest city of Serbia. It is located at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers and the crossroads of the Pannonian Plain and the Balkan Peninsula. The urban area of the City of Belgrade has a population of 1.23 million, while nearly 1.7 million people live within its administrative limits.
Heroin, also known as diamorphine among other names, is an opioid most commonly used as a recreational drug for its euphoric effects. It is used medically in several countries to relieve pain or in opioid replacement therapy. It is typically injected, usually into a vein, but it can also be smoked, snorted, or inhaled. The onset of effects is usually rapid and lasts for a few hours.
At trial, she pleaded that she only committed the crime under duress. A defence of duress, under section 17 of the Criminal Code, is available only when a person "commits an offence under compulsion by threats of immediate death or bodily harm from a person who is present when the offence is committed".
Ruzic claimed she had no other option and that both her and her mother's life were at risk. She also claimed that she could not go to the police because she believed them to be corrupt and would be of no help. Expert testimony validated this belief that Yugoslav citizens were generally untrusting of the police and their ability to protect them from rampant militias.
Nonetheless, her claim failed on the grounds that she was not under a threat of "immediate death or bodily harm" and that the man was not "present when the offence was committed".
Ruzic challenged section 17 of the Criminal Code as unconstitutional as it violated her right to security of person under section 7 of the Charter.
Security of the person is a basic entitlement guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948. It is also a human right explicitly mentioned and protected by the European Convention on Human Rights, the Constitution of Canada, the Constitution of South Africa and other laws around the world.
The trial judge agreed with Ruzic and held that the defence duress was available to her and consequently she was acquitted. The appeal was dismissed on appeal to the Court of Appeal for Ontario.
The Court of Appeal for Ontario is an appellate court in Ontario that is based at historic Osgoode Hall in downtown Toronto.
Opinion of the court
On April 20, 2001, the Supreme Court upheld the acquittal and dismissed the Crown appeal.
LeBel J, writing for a unanimous Court, held that section 17 of the Criminal Code violated section 7 of the Charter on the basis that its requirements were too restrictive by requiring presence and immediacy. The requirements meant the defence was unavailable in situations where the threat is to a third party or involves harm in the future.
LeBel agreed with the trial judge's finding that a common law defence of duress that did not have the same restrictions was also available. In the common law defence, the accused must make a reasonable effort to combat the threat, the severity of the criminal conduct must be proportional to the threat, and the accused must have no reasonable alternative of escape.
An assault is the act of inflicting physical harm or unwanted physical contact upon a person or, in some specific legal definitions, a threat or attempt to commit such an action. It is both a crime and a tort and, therefore, may result in either criminal and/or civil liability. Generally, the common law definition is the same in criminal and tort law.
A summary offence is a crime in some common law jurisdictions that can be proceeded against summarily, without the right to a jury trial and/or indictment.
Attempted murder is a crime of attempt in various jurisdictions.
Culpable homicide is a categorisation of certain offences in various jurisdictions within the Commonwealth of Nations which involves the illegal killing of a person either with or without an intention to kill depending upon how a particular jurisdiction has defined the offence. Unusually for those legal systems which have originated or been influenced during rule by the United Kingdom, the name of the offence associates with Scots law rather than English law.
R v Daviault [1994] 3 S.C.R. 63, is a Supreme Court of Canada decision on the availability of the defence of intoxication for "general intent" criminal offences. The Leary rule which eliminated the defence was found unconstitutional in violation of both section 7 and 11(d) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Instead, intoxication can only be used as a defence where it is so extreme that it is akin to automatism or insanity.
Section 11 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is the section of the Canadian Constitution that protects a person's legal rights in criminal and penal matters. This includes both criminal as well as regulatory offences, as it provides rights for those accused by the state for public offences. There are nine enumerated rights protected in section 11.
The criminal law of Canada is under the exclusive legislative jurisdiction of the Parliament of Canada. The power to enact criminal law is derived from section 91(27) of the Constitution Act, 1867. Most criminal laws have been codified in the Criminal Code, as well as the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, Youth Criminal Justice Act and several other peripheral statutes.
Common assault was an offence under the common law of England, and has been held now to be a statutory offence in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It is committed by a person who causes another person to apprehend the immediate use of unlawful violence by the defendant. It was thought to include battery but it does not. In England and Wales, the penalty and mode of trial for this offence is now provided section 39 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, and it has been held that the offence should be alleged as contrary to the statute because of this. It was also held that common assault and battery are two distinct offences, so that a charge that the accused "assaulted and battered" another person would be bad for duplicity.
In English law, the defence of necessity recognizes that there may be situations of such overwhelming urgency that a person must be allowed to respond by breaking the law. There have been very few cases in which the defence of necessity has succeeded, and in general terms there are very few situations where such a defence could even be applicable. The defining feature of such a defence is that the situation is not caused by another person and that the accused was in genuine risk of immediate harm or danger.
Duress in English law is a complete common law defence, operating in favour of those who commit crimes because they are forced or compelled to do so by the circumstances, or the threats of another. The doctrine arises in both English criminal law, and in civil law, where it is relevant to English contract law and English trusts law.
R v Hess; R v Nguyen, [1990] 2 S.C.R. 906 is a decision of the Supreme Court of Canada where the Court struck down part of the Criminal Code offence of rape as a violation of section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
R v Stevens, [1988] 1 S.C.R. 1153, was a decision of the Supreme Court of Canada rendered on June 30, 1988, concerning the retrospective application of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
English criminal law concerns offences, their prevention and the consequences, in England and Wales. Criminal conduct is considered to be a wrong against the whole of a community, rather than just the private individuals affected. The state, in addition to certain international organisations, has responsibility for crime prevention, for bringing the culprits to justice, and for dealing with convicted offenders. The police, the criminal courts and prisons are all publicly funded services, though the main focus of criminal law concerns the role of the courts, how they apply criminal statutes and common law, and why some forms of behaviour are considered criminal. The fundamentals of a crime are a guilty act and a guilty mental state. The traditional view is that moral culpability requires that a defendant should have recognised or intended that they were acting wrongly, although in modern regulation a large number of offences relating to road traffic, environmental damage, financial services and corporations, create strict liability that can be proven simply by the guilty act.
Marital coercion was a defence to most crimes under English criminal law and under the criminal law of Northern Ireland. It is similar to duress. It was abolished in England and Wales by section 177 of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, which came into force on 13 May 2014. The abolition does not apply in relation to offences committed before that date.
In Australia, murder, like most criminal law, is defined by State legislation. In any jurisdiction within Australia, the maximum penalty for murder is life imprisonment; this is the mandatory penalty in Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory.
Murder in Canada is defined as a culpable homicide with specific intentions. It is defined by the Criminal Code, a statute passed by the Parliament of Canada and which applies uniformly across Canada.
In India according to Section 300 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, murder is defined as follows:
Murder.--Except in the cases hereinafter excepted, culpable homicide is murder, if the act by which the death is caused is done with the intention of causing death, or- 167 2ndly.-If it is done with the intention of causing such bodily injury as the offender knows to be likely to cause the death of the person to whom the harm is caused. or- 3rdly.-If it is done with the intention of causing bodily injury to any person and the bodily injury intended to be inflicted is sufficient in the ordinary course of nature to cause death, or- 4thly.-If the person committing the act knows that it is so imminently dangerous that it must, in all probability, cause death, or such bodily injury as is likely to cause death, and commits such act without any excuse for incurring the risk of causing death or such injury as aforesaid.
R v Hibbert, [1995] 2 SCR 973, is a Supreme Court of Canada decision on aiding and abetting and the defence of duress in criminal law. The court held that duress is capable of negating the mens rea for some offences, but not for aiding the commission of an offence under s. 21(1)(b) of the Criminal Code. Nonetheless, duress can still function as an excuse-based defence.
R v Ryan [2013] SCC 3 is a case concerning the availability of duress in the context of domestic violence.
R v Nur 2015 SCC 15 is a Canadian constitutional law case, concerning the constitutionality of mandatory minimum sentences for firearm offences.
