L’application et l’interprétation de la Loi sur l’adéquation de la peine et du crime par les acteurs judiciaires entre 2010 et 2016
Current legislation allows for pre-sentence detention time to be taken into account in sentencing. Subsection 719 (3) of the Criminal Code regulates the accounting of the credit for the penalty for this type of detention. Since the Truth in Sentencing Act came into force in 2010, the Criminal Code stipulates that the judge must apply on the sentence a one-day credit for each day spent in pre-sentence detention. A maximum of one and a half days for each day of pre-sentence detention may be granted when the circumstances warrant. This law, which would be part of a punitive turn of criminal policies, brought in legislative tightening by circumscribing the judicial power when calculating the credit for the time already spent in custody. The objective of this study is to understand the application and interpretation of the Truth in Sentencing Act by judicial actors between 2010 and 2016. To do so, an analysis of judgments of the Court of Quebec and R.v. Summers (2014) of the Supreme Court of Canada has been carried out. The reasons given by the judges for the calculation of the credit have been highlighted. It appears that the living conditions in pre-sentence detention and that the behavior of the accused support the judges' decisions. Indeed, the results of the study indicate that the difficulty of the remand conditions is a reason which contributes to the granting of increased credit. This reason taken up by the judges draws on an argument from the case law prior to the legislative changes of 2010. In addition, the “bad behavior” of the accused may lead the judges to calculate the credit downwards. From this, we conclude that the judicial actors partly resisted the penal policy of 2010, but also that a penal severity tints the calculation of the credit.
Punitive turn criminal policies penal severity Truth in Sentencing Act pre-sentence detention pretrial detention case law court decision credit calculation enhanced credit