Read the article bud.

Crown attorney Sarah Repka told the court on Thursday that prosecutors have since been able to review further evidence, including medical records and the results of forensic testing, that were not available to police when they first laid charges.

At the time that the charges were brought, the evidence suggested he may have broken the law. New evidence made it sufficiently clear that he hadn’t. That’s a really big part of how prosecutions work.

We have a very simple principle here; proportionate response. Someone tries to beat the crap out of you, you got every right to beat the crap out of him. Someone pulls a knife on you, you can pull a knife on him. Someone attacks you with enough physical force and threat that you’re in fear of your life, you can do what it takes to protect yourself. And it’s very, very rare that cases like this even get prosecuted, because the law and the courts are very generous to the defendant.

You can absolutely defend yourself in Canada. We just don’t like the idea of people gunning down a teenager for the crime of ringing their doorbell.

The Crown dropped the case of their own accord after reviewing the additional evidence. He didn’t have to defend himself in court.

Obviously that doesn’t mean that no legal costs were incurred. We do have public defenders in Canada, so it’s likely those costs were born by the state. If he did incur any out of pocket expenses I would certainly like to see him compensated for those. Unfortunately I’m not aware of what the specific law is on that matter.

But again, as I pointed out elsewhere, this is a very, very rare case. Normally cases for self-defence are never even brought to begin with. The Crown either fucked up very badly here, or they sincerely believed that they had a very strong case that this was not legitimate.

That can happen in any justice system. Unless your simply declare that all murder is legal, there is absolutely no version of a style defence exemption that will not sometimes be wrongly prosecuted. The question here is not whether or not the prosecuters were right to bring the case, it’s whether or not Canada’s legal self-defence standard makes sense. And given a choice between what we have, which works extremely well, and very rarely produces outlier results like this (remember, you never hear about the self-defence incidents that don’t get prosecuted) and a system where cleaners get shot for knocking at the wrong house, I think the choice is clear.

There’s a few ways I would like to take this but also I think overall I agree with you.

I don’t go into it to much but where I’m slowly adapting my views are on a few issues.

One is that I think one is that no cost should be incurred by anyone who defended themselves. I do totally get the argument that everybody deserves justice including criminals. But the stories I’ve come across tend to highlight how self defense laws are lacking in Canada and there is a lot of room between allowing all killings and some kind of castle doctrine.

The second issue for me is as I’ve aged, I can’t tell you what the hell police do. The amount of times myself or someone i know has called them, only for them to say “not much we can do, just file a report online” is too many. Yet majority of my municipal taxes go to them. So for me I am coming around to the idea that we need to pull back some of the responsibility society has given to police and reclaim it ourselves. They’re not keeping us safe. They are now refusing to act when the government tells them to. Because of this I think society does need to go back to the idea that we can’t rely on the justice system.

The amount of times myself or someone i know has called them, only for them to say “not much we can do, just file a report online”

Exactly how high do you want your taxes to go? Complete coverage for all o the calls would be prohibitively expensive, and I suspect you would be one of the first people to protest your high taxes.