You just can’t make this stuff up, folks:
A man who walked into a bank, gave a teller a note saying “This is a robbery” and then demanded money, took $600 cash from the teller, and left the bank with it, has been cleared of a robbery charge by a judge who ruled what he did is not, in fact, a robbery.
The judge found a bank robbery is only a bank robbery if the teller is scared..
What do you call it when people are scared by a ruling?
(Justice Gary Trotter) pointed out the word “robbery” and its past tense “robbed” have many meanings in common parlance, from break and enter to financial fraud. “More colloquially, and beyond the realm of the criminal law, the term ‘robbed’ is sometimes used to describe great misfortune in other circumstances, including sporting events,” the judge wrote.
Justice Gary Trotter should be removed from the bench and disbarred.
Whatever he’s being paid, it’s too much.
I did not know that you could find a law degree at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box.
Once again, we see the infinite wisdom of the judge.
Five bucks says he’s Liberal!
This is stand up comedy right?
I had a friend who always thought that if you gave the note to the teller and said May I please have the money instead of this is a robbery, it wasn’t a robbery based on the fact that the teller could just say no. Maybe he was on to something.
Anyone gone to Elections Canada database to see if Gary Trotter is an LPC donor?
When something so obvious can be interpreted subjectively and “ruled” on by untouchable authorities and twisted away from obvious intent, something is wrong. What’s worse, Canada’s economic future increasing falls under rulings from appointed Jurists in the SCOC with the “First Nations” file essentially “creating sovereignty” at the expense of the Crown. How come the most important (and exclusively progressive) Law comes from the unaccountable Judiciary rather than the Legislative bodies?
Who is John Galt?
Then the law is an ass……chuck dickens
Why aren’t we electing our judges?
John Galt is LAS. Remember him? He got tired of being ignored so he changed his name.
Maybe this is Mr Scaredy Briefs?
Gary T Trotter
Gary T Trotter received an LLB from the University of Toronto, an LLM from Osgoode Hall Law School, as well as an MPhil and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He was a lawyer with the Crown Law Office (Criminal) in Toronto before becoming a law professor (and then Associate Dean and Acting Dean) at the Faculty of Law at Queen’s University. He was appointed to the Ontario Court of Justice in 2005 and then to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in 2008. In addition to other publications, he is the author of The Law of Bail in Canada.
http://www.irwinlaw.com/authors/gary-t-trotter
Appointed by the bike courier killer.
http://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/news/2005/20051202-jd-appt-nr.asp
“”he said the decision “is on all fours with accepted Canadian law””
I assume he’s trying to reference a bit of jargon like “on point” or “within the four corners of the law”, but his garbled version is unintentionally more accurate.
I say if it wasn’t a robbery, the teller was complicit in theft.
Has SDA been taken over progressives? Sounds like the rest of the you want the judge to rewrite the law to have the meaning they think it should have instead of what was actually passed by parliament. The judge was correct, words mean things. No violence, no threat of violence and no fear of violence. Not a robbery as defined by the CCC. The judge may very well agree that a robbery should simply be defined as a physical theft directly from another person, but that isn’t what the law says.
Don’t be so stupid PB. What are you going to tell us next. It wasn’t a car jacking because it was a truck? Not really a home invasion if the occupants are just renting?
Boy it’s not hard to spot progressive nonsense when you see it and you are just full of it.
Well, judge might be a dickhead alright, but for the offence of robbery to be made out, there either has to be an application of force, or an indication (by threat, actions or implication)that force might be applied.
And if the teller took the stand and testified that she wasn’t really scared, and she just handed over the cash because that was her bank’s policy, I can see where the Crown might have some difficulty proving the elements of the offence.
Nothing progressive about insisting that judges enforce the law as written and not as they wish it to be. Perhaps you agree with Obama that a “state” exchange is not limited to a state exchange but includes the federal one as well. Again, words mean things. At least I’m not a hypocrite.
I guess the judge didn’t read the criminal code.
(2) A person commits theft when, with intent to steal anything, he moves it or causes it to move or to be moved, or begins to cause it to become movable.
When they made this guy judge we the citizens were robbed.
You are witnessing the neurotic behavior of jurocrats in a law system devolved by pathological ideology. It was bad enough that we live under a legal system rather than a justice system, but having to witness, in stunned disempowered silence as it devolves even further to a point where there is no universal moral imperative represented by the law, is the stuff of epic civil discord.
Courts, and government for that matter, exist only to ensure our rights and property are protected and offences against them are made right. When the courts lose direction and defend some other morally ambiguous ideal, justice is denied. With no recourse left when our institutions of justice serve another interest, wide public disrepute of the system and courts is warranted – unless, of course, the courts are reflecting the absence of moral imperatives in society.
On a more ideological level, I think it is impossible for a socialist-prog culture warrior to sit on the bench and render civil justice because progs have no absolute morality thus no concept of the sanctity of private property rights or the evil of property crime. In this case it appears even the presence of mens rea (intent) in a criminal offence does not seem to impress a politicized jurocrat who has had their concepts of law and process eclipsed by irrelevant abstract ideologies.
For me the greatest sin Harper is guilty of is not pursuing a dedicated course of law reform and restoration of justice rather than worsening the situation by making jurocrats even more unaccountable.
Unlikely that this judgment will survive Appeal Court.
cgh – IF the crown appeals and even if it does, what consequence is there for a member of the bench who has so grossly and ineptly misinterpreted law and miscarried justice? Where is public recourse against errant judicial edict?
This incident is representative of a much larger problem.
So, imagine a similar case.
Guy walks up to his ex-girlfriend, hands her a note that reads, “This is a murder, I am going to kill you” and then proceeds to stab her in the neck.
girl lives…and the culprit is caught and brought before this same judge. The girl didn’t die….so it’s not really a murder. Charges him with assault and gives him probation.
Sounds about right for a Lawyer from toronto.
I’m curious, PB: the note “this is a robbery” to me is an implied threat. A robbery exists when goods are taken by force or by the threat of force. The robber (by his own note) identified that that was the case here. How is the robber’s choice of terms not a threat?
Yes, words have meanings. The robber’s words identified the crime that was being committed. Touchy-feely “how do you feel about that?” to a representative of the robbed is the part that I think should not be part of the determination of whether a crime has occurred, although it should be considered during sentencing.
the depth of stupidity will soon overwhelm us.
I suggest you study LAW , both criminal and civil, as implied is as good as executed.
A verbally implied contract is enforceable if provable. So with the robber not only implying theft, but stating such, then a robbery has been committed. Your type of thinking as well as the errant judge’s would bring many aspects of the criminal code into question. Conspiracy to commit comes to mind.
and this judge’s thinking is the very basis of the HRC’s BS
I know our laws are a little different south of the border, but the judge seems to have ruled correctly under well established (and genuinely conservative) traditions of English common law heritage. He distinguished between “theft,” which is not an act of violence or the threat of violence, and “robbery,” which is.
No one said the man is innocent, but he did not hurt or terrorize anyone and should not be punished as if he had.
There are enough genuine outrages to complain about without getting draconian and indignant about a pathetic case like this one.
Nold: The judge found him guilty of theft (actually, I guess the judge had no choice because the accused plead guilty to theft.) He just wasn’t found guilty of robbery as well, because the required sense of threat was not present.
That is covered in the article, albeit deep in the article after people get their knickers in a knot. The headline and slant of the article implies to those reading only to the end of the second paragraph (although to be honest, I missed it there and didn’t fully comprehend the story until the 15th paragraph.)
So, the question arises, why is it worth getting upset over this (where the perp actually is found guilty) but not over the many dozens of other, larger, frauds or worse, physical attacks, where the perp goes free?
George Orwell once wrote, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” Were he alive today, I’m sure that he would have amended his statement to “an intellectual or a lawyer”.
The defence did plead guilty to theft nstead of robbery and in support of this offered the argument that if the teller wasn’t scared of of the threat implicit in robbery, it wasn’t robbery. You agree with the judge’s acceptance of this argument because “words matter.”
If the robbery note had said he had a weapon but no weapon was shown because there actually wasn’t one, he’d have been charged with armed robbery despite being unarmed. Because it is long established in law that intent matters. The intent to have someone believe you are armed as part of your method of robbery is equivalent to being armed for the robbery. Because intent matters.
So, his intention was robbery, he acted on it, it was robbery. The court could have decided it was robbery because intent matters.
If the teller didn’t believe he was robbing her employer because she wasn’t scared, then she either decided to assist him in the theft, or she gave him the bank’s money because the bank has a policy of giving money to people who ask for it and aren’t entitled to it. If the bank gave away it’s money there hasn’t even been a theft.
LOL.
Give the guy a break. It was either that or admit to yet another failed liberal social experiment. Just think of this particular experiment as ‘ongoing’.
😉
As I understand the judge’s reasoning, one necessary component of robbery, but not theft, is that the victim be coerced, by force of threat thereof, into acting in a way s/he would otherwise not act; in this case, to hand over the money. By her own admission, the teller was not coerced. If so, her act of handing over the money was voluntary. And if so, she was not robbed, and no robbery occurred.
Why did she voluntarily hand the man the money? We do not know. There is the suggestion in the article that she acted out of charity towards the man and his mother: see the note. If this were true, she would be guilty of theft (but not robbery).
Stay tuned.
Correction: “… by force, or threat thereof …”
Canadians were more safe under common law. The repatriation of our Constitution was the greatest con job ever perpetrated upon the citizens of Canada by the legal industry.
Of course it will be appealed. There’s no recourse in any event against judges making silly decisions except by the appeal process and that always applies only to the judgment not the judge. And no, electing judges is no better than appointing them. Just look at the US, the public is capable of electing even more ridiculous individuals than those appointed in the British system.
Occam, you’re looking for perfection, and there is no such thing in any human institution.
Utterly irrelevant here. This is about the legal definition of robbery, which clearly states there must be theft by use of force or threat of use of force. None of us are lawyers, and none of us were in the courtroom, so none of us know how skilfully or incompetently the Crown presented its case.
I think everyone has missed the obvious.
Write a nice hold up note and get to the bank.
Should the bank teller be charged with theft? It’s not her money to hand out just because she feels sorry for the recipient. It seems that everyone is entitled to justice and charity here except for the bank depositors and shareholders whose money is being freely dispensed. Did the judge ever consider what kind of precedent he is creating? Not likely. Contrast this to the broad interpretation currently given to “hate” speech. The mere mention of hateful words dealing with sex or gender seems to warrant severe penalties these days, but if you are attempting to take someone’s money or property, the law solely focuses on getting you back on the street ASAP.
Um, no cgh, it’s about the broader institution, our laws and them being applied. The robber intended to rob, and he did, legal definition of robbery met. Intent is the key to this discussion, not some legalese definition of robbery. The judge erred, full stop!
I agree 100% with you NME666.
I was thinking: people – HERE – siding with the judge?!?!
As EBD sez, you just can’t make this stuff up.
This is what is sometimes called Jesuitical thinking no? As NME666 says “legalistic” reasoning.
A medieval inquiry into the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.
He said it was a robbery. Ergo, it is so.
Can anything me more moronic than the argument that it isn’t so because she did not feel fear?
Mind you, it is consistent isn’t it? The import of FEELINGS (whoa, whoa, feeeeeeelings).
For hate crimes are based on this premise. For example, one murder is qualitatively different than another depending on the thoughts and feelings of the perp (except, of course, for muslims).
Bet you a few bank robbers in the States are thinking how do we get across the Canadian borders?
And how much will we get/fence for our stolen Canadian dollars?
The problem most people are having here is that they *think* they understand what an offense is under the CCC (or under common law for that matter), when they don’t really. Crime terms get bandied about without a real knowledge of the law, and most people’s concept of law, unfortunately, comes from a lifetime of television, unless they’ve found themselves embroiled in it.
“Theft” is what you do; “robbery” is the means… You can commit theft by many means other than robbery. The judge is saying that absence a threat of coercion(a necessary part of the legal definition of robbery), what occurred was a theft, but not a robbery.
Had the clerk said no, and the perp said “give me the money or I’ll kill you”,or, “I have a [gun,knife]”, then a robbery would have occurred. Had the note said, “this is a robbery, I have a gun”, then it would have been a robbery…but just because the perp thinks it was without a weapon, doesn’t make it so.
These are a tough call for the banks – how the clerk handles these. I was involved with a case a few years ago (in the GTA) with a similar situation, in which the clerk said no, and the perp shot and killed her…
The law has a long history with theft done out of desperation, where acts of theft are done not because of ruthlessness, but of genuine need; hence the fine points when trying to ascertain the nature and intent of the crime just committed, and the fit punishment to be handed out.
The law is rarely as simple as most people see it. Words have meaning in law in order to prevent the abuse of justice, but they sometimes aide the perversion of it as well.
The judge either has sawdust in their head of the middle name must be STUPID
I wonder how the bank’s policy would apply to a note which said:
“please give me some money, my mother is sick”
since that seems to be the teller’s (and judges) interpretation of the situation.
Your mere insistence that this case satisfies the legal definition of robbery on the sole basis of the man’s intention to rob, together with the fact that money was taken, ignores the several interesting remarks made by some of the commenters, above, as well as a great deal of law. And it assumes, without argument, that the judge’s reasoning, and presumably that of the defense, is without merit. It appears therefore to be an attempt to stop the conversation.
The law embodies our thinking about many interesting and complicated matters. It is always worth taking seriously, even, and especially, when it gets things wrong.
The state of mind of the accused robber—that he intended by force or threat thereof to get the goods—is one necessary condition of robbery. But it is alone insufficient for robbery. That his intention to rob is by itself insufficient for robbery is made plain by the distinction between robbery and attempted robbery. And, as this case shows, it seems to the judge, the defense, and to me, at least, that the state of mind of the alleged victim is also relevant. If, in this case, the teller was not motivated by fear or otherwise coerced into handing over the money, she was not robbed. How, exactly, to characterize her action awaits further information about her state of mind—as the lawyers say, her mens. If she acted out of charity, it would be a charitable act; but since she would have been charitable with someone else’s money, it would also be theft. If she was acting according to a bank policy to always comply with the demands of a would-be robber, she would not be guilty of theft. And, it seems to me that if the bank’s policy is to always comply with attempted robbery, whether or not the teller takes the threat seriously, then it—that policy—erases one of the necessary components of robbery. On its basis, a clever miscreant could turn every attempt of his to rob a bank into mere theft, as some above have noted.
The one difference, would be if the perp entered the bank and approached the teller while brandishing a weapon. At that point, the charge of attempted robbery would be complete, and if he actually got out with the money, then there is theft by robbery. The bank’s hands are tied – see my post just above – if there is a risk of harm to employees due to resistance, then the bank will simplify its policy – hand over the money. The bank has a fiduciary obligation to minimise risk to its employees. It could employ armed guards, but it doesn’t really want a shootout on its premises either.
And, it seems to me that if the bank’s policy is to always comply with attempted robbery, whether or not the teller takes the threat seriously, then it—that policy—erases one of the necessary components of robbery.
No – that transfers the burden of the crime to the victim. In the absence of a specific threat, the judge has to ascertain whether or not the action of the perp constituted a threat in and of itself. He deduces that from the response of the clerk. If the clerk, in the absence of an overt threat, did not feel threatened, then the necessary component of coercion wasn’t there – the clerk could have said no. It is unknown whether had she said no, the crime would have elevated to a robbery or not. By the teller’s complying with his request, per bank policy, and him taking the money, completes the requirements for a charge of theft, since he had no entitlement to the funds, whether the clerk acceded to his request or not.
Skip, you seem to think that the mens of the victim in an attempt to rob is irrelevant to how we should characterize the act. So: Suppose you were to accost me in a dark alley, brandish a pistol and say to me “Your money or your life!”. If, out of fear for my life, I were to therefore hand you my money, a clearer case of robbery we could not ask for. But suppose, instead, I were to say “My dear fellow, no need to threaten. I’m a very generous fellow, and since you look as though you need a few bucks, I give you 50 of ’em.”, and I hand over the cash. Now: have you robbed me?
Quite right, Nick, in all your posts here. The law is as it is written, not what we think it is.
“the term ‘robbed’ is sometimes used to describe great misfortune in other circumstances, including sporting events,” the judge wrote.”
The term “killed” fits in his stupid little anecdote nicely too.
I guess prosecutors will now have to prove the murder victim was scared before they died.
I wonder how many appeals of quality robbery convictions this idiocy now opens the door for?
Reread my last post. The mens of the victim is only relevant when the actions of the perp almost, but not quite, complete the requirements for a charge. To complete a charge of robbery, in the absence of an overt or direct or assumable threat, the mens of the victim becomes the telltale test of whether or not coercion was real or implied. For that, the victim has to have felt a real tangible threat. Robbery is a forcible act. The banks know that if the perp takes the money from the teller, whether threatened or not, a provable act of theft has occurred; hence the banks say to tellers – hand over the money, i.e., “gotcha!”
In your example, yes, you have been robbed in either case. Whether you realize it or not you have acknowledged the threat, and since the threat is present in both circumstances, it’s a robbery…
The perp’s note only said “this is a robbery”. There is no threat, directly, and whether or not it is implied, depended on the the perception of the victim, the teller. in the absence of a perceived or direct threat, the teller did not feel threatened. Therefore the necessary coercion was not there. Again, had the note saide “this is a robbery, I have a gun”, then an implied threat is present. Saying “this is a robbery” in and of itself doesn’t constitute a threat, only an action. And the teller validated that.