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

Chapter 7: St. John's, Newfoundland

7.1 Objectives, report format and methodology

Key Objectives

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

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

7.1.1 Report Format

The findings for St. John's 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 victims, 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 St. John's.

7.1.2 Methodology

For St. John's, 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 St. John's-based persons who assisted in observing in court and in preparing the Disposed Cases file of data.

7.1.3 An Important Caveat

We were fortunate to have designed the study to ensure that we would have multiple sources of data to conduct a study of this type.  This design strategy was especially important in St. John's.

As in most other courts in the current study, court manual and automated systems had not been designed to collect accurate and comprehensive data on either the frequency or impact of legal representation.   Before reporting the results of the data analysis, we therefore conducted a number of checks to assess the extent to which we should rely on different sources of data for different parts of the analysis. 

In particular, we concluded that the analysis for St. John's should place more emphasis on the Court Observation (as opposed to the Disposed Cases data) when discussing frequency of representation at first appearance – or non-final appearance.  The court observations were carried out by a very knowledgeable person specially trained by the researchers to observe matters related to legal representation.  Thus, when we noticed that statistics based on data from the Disposed Cases file gave estimates of self-representation at first appearance that were considerably higher than estimates of self-representation at first and other non-final appearances based on the direct court observation – and on our interviews – and on the researcher's own observations – we felt it reasonable to discount the first appearance statistics from the Disposed Cases file.[58] 

The following sections will make it clear when these inconsistencies in the different sources of St.. John's data should be explicitly taken into account.[59]