N.L. justice officials can't say how many cases are tossed after trial delays. So we tracked them

The loretta young adult female, forthcoming nina from carolina months pregnant, testified by picture for three hours over two days, recounting her story of being raped and threatened by a former intimate partner. 

She said her onetime boyfriend had told her she “would be planning a bunch of funerals and a trial alone.”

The woman — whose identity is protected by a court-ordered publication ban — said she took that to mean he was going to harm her family.

“I thought he was going to kill them,” she told the court.

The accused had texted photos of him holding guns and weapons leaning up against a wall. They were entered into the court record.

So were text messages he sent her.

In one, she asked: “What ur gonna choke me out again?”

The reply: “No, much worse.”

The court ran out of time, and her cross-examination by the defence didn’t begin.

Proceedings were set to resume a few months later. But she never took the stand again.

The defence lawyer filed a so-called Jordan application, saying it had taken too long to complete the trial, and the rights of his client had been violated.

The 16 charges — including assault causing bodily harm by choking, sexual assault, firearms offences, uttering threats, and intimidation — were stayed. 

The trial ended. The accused went free. 

The case wasn’t decided on its merits, but by systemic failures that meant it wasn’t completed on time — and never would be.

A decade ago, the Supreme Court of Canada assailed “a culture of complacency towards delay” in the criminal justice system.

The R v Jordan decision set timelines for trials to be completed from the time charges are laid — 18 months in provincial courts, and 30 months in superior courts. Anything longer than that is presumed to be unreasonable, unless those delays can be attributed to the defence or exceptional circumstances.

“As the months following a criminal charge become years, everyone suffers,” the 2016 Supreme Court of Canada decision noted. 

“Accused persons remain in a state of uncertainty, often in pre-trial detention. Victims and their families who, in many cases, have suffered tragic losses cannot move forward with their lives.”

The top court wrote that “the stakes are indisputably high.”

High stakes — but recently, low levels of information disclosed by officials in Newfoundland and Labrador about the impacts of Jordan here.

The provincial Department of Justice has repeatedly said it doesn’t know the total number of cases that have been dropped because of trial delays, and can only provide the number of pending applications yet to be heard.

We’ve tracked dockets, attended court proceedings virtually and in person from Wabush to St. John’s, reviewed stacks upon stacks of court records, and listened to hours upon hours of archived audio.

Those efforts show that, over the past year and a half, at least 24 people had their charges stayed, dismissed, or withdrawn, after the Jordan timelines had been breached.

In some cases, the matters proceeded to a hearing, and a judge ruled in their favour. In others, the Crown simply opted to call no evidence. 

There were three sexual assault cases halted after Jordan applications were filed.

Those include proceedings against a Quebec man accused of sexually assaulting a Labrador woman, and the recent trial where the pregnant complainant testified. 

A third sexual assault case was dropped last summer, when the Crown found “there was no longer a reasonable likelihood of conviction” and called no evidence. 

In that case, the prosecutor told the court that their assessment was not related to the pending Jordan application, but gave no other reason. Charges had been laid two years earlier.

Four impaired driving cases were among those tossed because they took too long to get to trial.

In one of those cases, charges had been laid 52 months before court proceedings were finally halted.

Other stopped matters include allegations of aggravated assault, assaulting a police officer, arson, and fraud.

And those aren’t the only cases where Jordan played a role.

The Crown was successful in having at least a dozen Jordan applications dismissed — four of them in sexual assault cases — after contested hearings.

In a half dozen other cases, the Crown and defence cut a deal — on three occasions, agreeing to drop charges of assault or uttering threats by instead substituting a peace bond or a firearms ban.

An assault causing bodily harm by choking trial didn’t proceed this month when the Crown and defence agreed to a plea deal and time served. The accused had been previously convicted of drug offences and denied bail on the pending assault charges. In total, he served more than two years.

And in early 2025, a Jordan application in a backhoe bandit ATM theft case was dropped when the defence and Crown agreed on a plea deal for one of the accused.

On top of all those, there were even more Jordan applications filed that were never heard. 

Three years ago, the provincial Department of Justice did provide information about the number of cases stopped because of Jordan.

That coincided with a period when the numbers were low.

At a legislative hearing in the spring of 2023, director of public prosecutions Lisa Stead noted that there was only one Jordan application pending in cases handled by the provincial Crown.

“We have had no findings against, no applications that were successful against us in the last year,” Stead noted.

(The Federal Crown stickhandles some cases — drug offences, for example — but the majority are handled by provincial prosecutors.)

A year and a half later, in the fall of 2024, the provincial justice department provided a briefing note to the minister, in case questions about Jordan came up in the legislature.

The document assured that “the frequency of Jordan applications has greatly diminished over the last number of years.”

The department did not provide that information, instead calling Jordan applications a “snapshot in time” and “a moment in time.”

This month, the director of public prosecutions reiterated that the department doesn’t have details on past Jordan applications filed, and the outcomes of those cases.

“I can’t give you all that information as we don’t have that statistical data,” Stead wrote. “I can give you a snapshot in time.”

As of last week, that snapshot showed eight Jordan applications pending, including one in an ongoing child pornography trial, and three for matters alleging sexual assault.

One of those sexual assault cases involves Tony Humby, who has been on trial since last summer on 71 counts of sexual violence against 10 youths.

It is impossible to know whether our research captured all cases where Jordan played a role in Newfoundland and Labrador over the past 18 months.

Some of these matters appeared only briefly on the docket. We tried to check every day — sometimes multiple times a day — but that didn’t always happen. We may have missed others.

And Stead told a legislative committee last year that some Jordan applications are served on the Crown and never filed with the court. We’d have no way to access those.

As well, about six months into our research, we discovered that Jordan matters can appear in several different ways on the provincial court docket, not just the way we had been searching up to that point. That means we may have missed even more cases.

While the province doesn’t track Jordan outcomes, Statistics Canada data sheds some light on how many cases are potentially in peril.

The number of adult criminal cases in the province has remained relatively flat from 2019-20 compared to 2023-24.

But the data shows that the percentage of total cases exceeding the Jordan limit has more than doubled over the same time frame.

In 2023-24 — the year for which data is most recently available — there were 3,724 cases in Newfoundland and Labrador adult criminal courts.

According to Statistics Canada, more than one in six of those cases — 17.5 per cent — exceeded the Jordan limit.

That compares to just over one in 12 cases — 8.6 per cent — in 2019-20.

Two months after the pregnant woman testified in the sexual assault trial of her former partner, he was back in court. So were the lawyers.

But the woman wasn’t. She had received a head’s up on what was going to happen.

The Crown conceded the Jordan ceiling had been breached, and they couldn't find time to deduct to bring it under.

“It’s incredibly unfortunate, your honour,” the prosecutor said.

“Because as you’re aware, it’s a very serious matter. It’s not going to be adjudicated on the merits.”

The judge granted a stay of proceedings.

“It’s an unfortunate circumstance, and it’s one that we’re seeing too often in our courts,” he said. 

“Hopefully, as time goes on, things will be put in place to help remedy that.”

So why are cases being thrown out because they are taking too long to finish? What are the causes and contributing factors? We analysed dozens of cases reported on in this story, to try to answer that question. We’ll have more on that in the coming days and weeks. 

Have a story for us to investigate or a tip to pass along? Get in touch. Email us at cbcnlinvestigates@cbc.ca

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