Legal Aid Cuts and Guilty Pleas

Omar Ha-Redeye spoke to The Lawyers Daily on the effect of legal aid cuts on the criminal justice system,

Lawyer Omar Ha-Redeye, of Fleet Street Law, spoke of the bail changes possibly leading to innocent people having to spend lengthy periods in a cell while their matter is being sorted out.  

“We can expect a lot more compelled or coerced guilty pleas, by innocent individuals who just want their court ordeal to be over. … Without proper representation at a bail hearing, we can be fully confident that some innocent people in Ontario will be incarcerated until their trial date, often as long as [two] years in jail for a crime they did not commit.”

But Mallin said duty counsel are already handling 81 per cent of all bail hearings.

“Duty counsel are in bail court already and regularly run same day bail hearings,” she said. “We do not anticipate that there will be delays — in fact, possibly the opposite — but we will be monitoring to ensure that this change does not result in delay for LAO clients.”

Ha-Redeye disagreed.

“What Legal Aid Ontario is saying is we have all these great staff lawyers who can represent people at bail hearings, but it really ignores a number of realities. Number one is there are a number of lawyers who already have long-standing relationships with their clients, and that institutional history a lawyer has can often be the difference … between the person getting bail and denied bail.”