Abstract
Parliament enacted section 33.1 of the Criminal Code in 1995, in direct response to the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1994 decision in R. v. Daviault. Through this provision, it set out to remove the reach of the extreme intoxication defence from accused persons charged with personal violence offences, where their intoxication was self-induced. Parliament justified the imposition of criminal responsibility in these cases on the moral blameworthiness of voluntary intoxication, notwithstanding the majority’s ruling in Daviault that doing so offends the Charter. It was not until 2021 — more than 25 years after the enactment of section 33.1 — that the Charter issue came before the Court for hearing. In the much-anticipated case of R. v. Brown, the Court ruled that section 33.1 violates sections 7 and 11(d) and is not saved by section 1. Remarkably, just 25 days after the Brown decision was handed down, Parliament enacted a new section 33.1 in an effort to once again to limit the availability of the extreme intoxication defence. On this occasion, however, Parliament’s efforts were guided — and its ambitions tempered — by the Court’s clear articulation in Brown of minimum Charter requirements. This paper offers a summary of the Brown ruling. It then describes the constituent parts of the new section 33.1 and attempts to construct an analytical framework for the provision’s application in future cases. It concludes with a discussion of legal, evidentiary and practical issues that counsel and courts might soon encounter in those cases where the extreme intoxication defence is advanced, not least of which is concern about the differential treatment of accused persons based on intoxication symptoms.
Citation Information
Lawrence, Michelle S..
"Self-Induced Extreme Intoxication: Brown and Section 33.1 of the Criminal Code."
The Supreme Court Law Review: Osgoode’s Annual Constitutional Cases Conference
115.
(2024).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.60082/2563-8505.1454
https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/sclr/vol115/iss1/12
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