{"id":268793,"date":"2020-10-13T12:15:20","date_gmt":"2020-10-13T16:15:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/issues\/the-punishing-response-to-the-defence-of-extreme-intoxication\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T23:14:15","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T03:14:15","slug":"the-punishing-response-to-the-defence-of-extreme-intoxication","status":"publish","type":"issues","link":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/fr\/2020\/10\/the-punishing-response-to-the-defence-of-extreme-intoxication\/","title":{"rendered":"The punishing response to the defence of extreme intoxication"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the Ontario Court of Appeal<\/a> upheld the criminal defence of extreme intoxication this summer, the public backlash was swift and withering. Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath urged the Attorney General to appeal the decision, stating<\/a> \u201cwe should be supporting survivors of sexual assault and violent crime, not making it even harder.\u201d Professors Elizabeth Sheehy and Isabel Grant condemned the decision in this magazine as \u201cyet another blow to women.<\/a>\u201d Legal historian Constance Backhouse stressed the notorious \u201clinkages between alcohol and the abuse of women<\/a>,\u201d asking, \u201cWhat will the ruling mean for the vast number of women sexually assaulted by intoxicated men?\u201d<\/p>\n

Given the outcry, it may surprise some that neither R. v. Sullivan <\/em>nor R. v. Chan<\/em>, the cases dealt with in the court of appeal decision, involved alcohol, sexual assault, or intimate partner violence. Sullivan over-consumed prescription medication in a failed suicide attempt. In the psychotic episode that followed, he stabbed his mother in fear she was an alien. Chan experienced a psychotic break after consuming \u201cmagic mushrooms.\u201d He grievously wounded his father\u2019s partner and fatally stabbed his father, believing he was the devil.<\/p>\n

The backlash was in fact highly predictable in troubling ways. Critics who insisted that the law should hold accountable those who choose to become intoxicated and then inflict harm on others revived centuries-old concerns about the effects of male intoxication on women and children. On the one hand, critics echoed the moral claims of temperance-era feminists. On the other, they ignored decades of evolution in the way law and society understands substance use, addiction, and \u201cchoice.\u201d<\/p>\n

At stake in debates over the extreme intoxication defence are larger questions about how the criminal law defines and understands mental volition in the overwhelming majority of cases that will never meet the extreme intoxication standard.<\/p>\n

Politically diverse movements \u2013 from law-and-order conservatives to anti-violence feminists to victims\u2019 rights activists \u2013 have for decades called for individual responsibility, which the extreme intoxication defence seems to cut against. Sheehy and Grant gave voice to these commitments in castigating the decision as \u201cterrible public policy<\/a>\u201d that \u201ctells those who abuse alcohol and drugs that they are not responsible for their actions.\u201d<\/p>\n

These calls frame wrongdoing largely as a problem of individual choice with criminal punishment being a necessary response. This individualist lens obscures longstanding structural disparities in how the criminal system doles out punishment while reinforcing a sense that retribution is the best or most we should hope for.<\/p>\n

Criminologist Mariana Valverde argues in her book Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom<\/em><\/a> that these politically strange bedfellows have come to evaluate crime and punishment from the vantage point of the consequences and effects of acts rather than from the traditional perspective of the accused\u2019s mental state. A focus on vindicating victims competes with, and sometimes supersedes, countervailing questions about an accused\u2019s mental culpability.<\/p>\n

Advocates have worked to incorporate individual responsibility into the law through the doctrine of substituted mens rea<\/em>. According to this reasoning, the decision to consume an intoxicating substance is a morally significant choice. Even where an extremely intoxicated accused lacked the capacity to act voluntarily, a court should substitute his earlier decision to drink to find him criminally liable. In American common law parlance, courts might convict on the basis of \u201cconstructive malice aforethought\u201d \u2013 the intention to drink can substitute for the intention to commit a crime.<\/p>\n

Section 33.1 of the Criminal Code<\/em> \u2013 the provision that the Court of Appeal found unconstitutional \u2013 codified this reasoning. Parliament enacted s. 33.1 after similar backlash to the Supreme Court of Canada\u2019s 1994 decision in R. v. Daviault<\/em><\/a>. The Court recognized a defence of extreme intoxication in that case, which involved a 73-year-old sufferer of long-term chronic alcoholism who sexually assaulted a 65-year-old disabled woman. Section 33.1 provides that, in cases of self-induced intoxication, an accused who interferes or threatens to interfere with the bodily integrity of another can be convicted of a crime, regardless of whether he was acting voluntarily at the time.<\/p>\n

The Crown was not arguing that the \u201cvoluntary\u201d decision to become intoxicated proved an intention to commit an assault.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Court in Sullivan <\/em>and in Chan <\/em>held that s. 33.1 violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms<\/em>. Allowing someone to be convicted even when they were acting involuntarily contravenes principles of fundamental justice protected under section 7 of the Charter<\/em>. The Crown could not rely on substituted intent, Justice Paciocco wrote, \u201csince proving voluntary intoxication does not necessarily or even ordinarily prove the intention to commit assaults, let alone the assaults charged.\u201d The mental element required for an assault conviction pertains to the assault, not to the decision to become intoxicated.<\/p>\n

This response sidestepped the thrust of the Crown\u2019s argument. The Crown was not arguing that the \u201cvoluntary\u201d decision to become intoxicated proved an intention to commit an assault. The Crown was making a moral<\/em> claim about intoxication itself. Defendants should be punished even for \u201cunintended or involuntary consequences\u201d because they engaged in the \u201cblameworthy predicate act\u201d of becoming intoxicated.<\/p>\n

The Women\u2019s Legal Education and Action Fund<\/a> likewise stressed the immorality of intoxication in its intervention in the case<\/a>. \u201cThese individuals are not morally blameless; they chose to consume intoxicating substances in amounts that contributed to them perpetrating violence against others. Victims \u2013 and women \u2013 should not bear the risk of this choice.\u201d The immorality of imbibing to the point of intoxication provides the scaffolding on which to pin criminal culpability for violence.<\/p>\n

These arguments revive longstanding claims about inebriety and its victims. Concerns about the use and effects of alcohol fueled the anglo-American temperance movement<\/a>, which \u201cwas the most popular, influential and long-lived social reform movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.\u201d In both the United States and Canada, mostly middle and upper-middle-class white women excoriated male drinking as a cause of family destitution and violence. In the words of Canadian suffragist Nellie McClung, the liquor traffic had \u201cwaged war on women and children all down the centuries<\/a>.\u201d Providing one of the few opportunities for political action by women, temperance unions forged an indelible link between feminist organizing and the problems of alcohol.<\/p>\n

Modern talk of intoxication as a \u201cmoral choice,\u201d however, requires an immense amount of forgetting. For decades, activists and policy-makers have challenged notions of will power and choice in the context of substance use. Recently, the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Zora<\/em><\/a> warned against imposing bail conditions such as alcohol or drug abstinence that may target mental health conditions. \u201cSubjecting individuals who are presumed innocent to abstention conditions may effectively punish them for what are recognized health concerns,\u201d Justice Martin wrote. At the pre-trial stage, alcohol and drug use is increasingly viewed through a mental health lens, only to be transformed into an exercise of free will at the culpability stage.<\/p>\n

Canadians are reckoning today with the ways that criminal law bears down heavily and unevenly on Indigenous people, Black Canadians, people of colour, the poor, and those with mental health and addiction struggles. More often than not, these groups overlap and intersect. In 2015, to the Office of the Correctional Investigator of Canada found that 80 percent of federally incarcerated men<\/a> were struggling with addiction or substance abuse. Two-thirds of federal offenders were under the influence<\/a> of an intoxicant when they committed their index offence. Nearly all federally sentenced Indigenous women (92 percent)<\/a> have been assessed as having moderate or high substance abuse needs.<\/p>\n

The ideological premise underlying all criminal law is that individuals freely exercise some mental intent when they commit wrongful acts. The extreme intoxication defence reinforces this premise. Only those in an intoxicated state akin to automatism \u2013 truly lacking any <\/em>degree of voluntariness \u2013 can avail of it. Everyone else, the masses of people who commit non-violent and violent offences while in the grips of substances, are arrested, charged, convicted, and punished. In our current moment of grief, desperation, and rage, we might hope for more transformative change to a system that punishes bodies and minds alike.<\/p>\n

Photo: Shutterstock\/By GrAl<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld the criminal defence of extreme intoxication this summer, the public backlash was swift and withering. Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath urged the Attorney General to appeal the decision, stating \u201cwe should be supporting survivors of sexual assault and violent crime, not making it even harder.\u201d Professors Elizabeth Sheehy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":278264,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","ep_exclude_from_search":false,"apple_news_api_created_at":"2025-10-08T03:14:17Z","apple_news_api_id":"3d1eb956-82b4-4cfe-8b66-ef79d0816581","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2025-10-08T03:14:18Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/APR65VoK0TP6LZu950IFlgQ","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false},"categories":[9359,9357,9372],"tags":[8651,8392,9241,8496],"article-status":[],"irpp-category":[4218,4263,4348,4339,4251],"section":[],"irpp-tag":[7091,7122],"class_list":["post-268793","issues","type-issues","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-loi-droits","category-politiques-sociales","category-recent-stories-fr","tag-alcohol","tag-charter-of-rights-fr","tag-systeme-de-justice","tag-sexualized-violence-fr","irpp-category-addiction","irpp-category-constitution-fr","irpp-category-egalite-des-genres","irpp-category-loi-et-justice","irpp-category-politique-sociale","irpp-tag-charte-des-droits","irpp-tag-violence-liee-au-genre"],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe punishing response to the defence of extreme intoxication<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/fr\/2020\/10\/the-punishing-response-to-the-defence-of-extreme-intoxication\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"fr_FR\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The punishing response to the defence of extreme intoxication\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld the criminal defence of extreme intoxication this summer, the public backlash was swift and withering. 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