The Preliminary Hearing: Canadian Practice
| Published date | 01 January 1937 |
| Date | 01 January 1937 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/002201833700100110 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
The
Preliminary
Hearing:
Canadian
Practice
WE
have recently had sent to us the October issue of The
Royal Canadian Mounted Police Quarterly.
It
is a
journal dealing with many subjects interesting to the police
both from the legal and administrative points of view, and
amongst other articles there is one by
Mr.
J. C. Martin, K.C.,
upon the subject of "
The
Preliminary
Hearing",
namely the
hearing of an indictable case before a Justice of the Peace. By
the kind permission of
Mr.
Martin and of the publishers of the
Quarterly we are enabled to give our readers a copy of this
most interesting article.
It
will be seen that in Canada they have a Criminal Code
there and that the procedure in indictable cases before the
Magistrate is very much the same as that in this country.
There
is one point which strikes us as being in the nature of
progressive and an advance on our legal system here, and that
is the abolition of the English classification of crime into
felonies and misdemeanours.
This
arises under section 14 of
the Code. Owing to such classification in this country serious
anomalies occur.
For
instance, one is that in a felony case a
police officer can arrest without awarrant,
but
in the case of
misdemeanour (with certain specified exceptions) a warrant is
necessary.
It
follows that a man who is found stealing a shilling
can be arrested by the constable on the spot or can be given
into custody by the person from whom the money has been
stolen,
but
if the same man obtains athousand pounds by
false pretences, in substance a far more serious matter, it would
be necessary to have a warrant to effect his arrest. Another
distinction is that in this country there are certain disabilities
attaching to a man who has been convicted of felony, however
trivial the offence may be, yet the same disabilities do not
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