Court Site Study of Adult Unrepresented Accused in the Provincial Criminal Courts (Part 2: Site Reports)

Chapter 2: Regina

2.1 Objectives and methodology

The Department of Justice and the Federal/Provincial/Territorial Permanent Working Group on Legal Aid retained the research team to engage in a national study to measure:

A brief overview of the full national study – covering nine court sites – has been presented in Chapter 1. The methodology for the Regina part of the national study followed a strategy for data collection and site visits similar to that followed in the other sites.

2.1.1 Report format

The findings for Regina are presented in seven sections.

Section 1 outlines the objectives of the study, describes the format of the report, and discusses the methodology used to collect information.
Section 2 provides important contextual information for interpreting the findings of the report. Special attention is give to key characteristics of the community, the court, legal aid, duty counsel and disclosure.
Section 3 describes how frequently self-represented accused appear at different stages of the court process.
Section 4 explores the frequency with which accused persons have other types of representation, and how those frequencies vary at different stages of the court process.
Section 5 focuses on the important impacts of self-representation on the accused. The section discusses both perceptions provided from our interviews and empirical evidence from data especially collected for the project.
Section 6 then describes other significant impacts – due to the presence of unrepresented accused – on the key groups involved in the courts (e.g., legal aid, duty counsel, Crown attorneys, judges and court personnel), and on court operations (including court workloads and time to deal with and dispose of cases).
Section 7 completes the report with key overall findings, and solutions that have been suggested by those interviewed in Regina.

2.1.2 Methodology

The methodology involved data collection and site visits.  Information was available on the question of unrepresented accused from three sources:

In all parts of the project, we received excellent co-operation and assistance from all those we asked to participate in the study.  We also gratefully acknowledge the very able assistance and expertise of the two Regina-based persons who assisted in observing in court and in preparing the electronic file of data from the JAIN automated information system.


[1] Trial courts were not included in this part of the data collection.