A sexual assault case was stayed for delay after the guilty verdict. Jacques Gallant wrote an article for the Toronto Star on this case titled “She testified. The jury found a man guilty of raping her. It was only then a GTA judge tossed the case for delay.” Timothy Toole, an acquaintance of the victim (whose name is protected) had a few drinks with the woman when he came to see her new home in June 2020. The woman, Gallant reports, “testified she doesn’t remember having sex with Toole; her friend testified that she walked in on them and that the complainant appeared unconscious.” Toole admitted to having had sex with the complainant but “claimed she was conscious and consenting.”

The 30-month Jordan ceiling was surpassed by 9 months and 17 days. Justice Chozik made the decision to decline to hear Timothy Toole’s s.11(b) application for his right to a timely trial until after, reasoning that it would have further adjourned the trial. This was a tough decision to make. It risked reversing a guilty verdict to a charge of “alleged” sexual assault in the hopes of squeezing in a verdict within the Jordan time limit and making it easier to rule on the trial’s timeliness.

The Toronto Star article is written with a focus on the perspective of the victim who saw the guilty verdict given, just to see the case charge go back to “alleged” sexual assault. It’s no wonder the article is written from this perspective. It feels unconscionable to set a person free who has received a guilty verdict for something as serious as sexual assault. The trial was subject to various types of delays, the largest of which was because of a mistrial that was not the fault of either the crown or the defence. The 30-month Jordan ceiling was surpassed by 9 months and 17 days. There were 5 months and 18 days of delay that resulted from the adjournment of the first trial, and an astounding 9 months and 26 days of delay from the date of the mistrial (December 5, 2022) till the conclusion of the trial on September 27, 2023. Justice Chozik found that the 5 months and 18 days of delay was not defence delay. However, while she found that the delay resulting from the mistrial was an exceptional circumstance, she concluded that only 3 or 4 months of the delay were attributable to the mistrial (R v Toole, 2023, CanLII). The case was subsequently stayed.