The Justice Files

Ontario Superior Court Justice Heather McArthur has upheld bail for a 19-year-old man accused of opening fire on the U.S. Consulate in Toronto.

Zara Jabbi was released on July 7 under conditions that reportedly include house arrest, GPS monitoring and restrictions on electronic devices. The Crown sought to overturn that release, but McArthur dismissed its bail-review application on August 27.

The public is prohibited from learning why Jabbi was initially released or why McArthur allowed him to remain on bail because both sets of reasons are protected by a court-imposed publication ban.

Police allege Jabbi and 18-year-old Sheldon Tracey-Stewart exited a stolen Honda CR-V outside the U.S. Consulate shortly before 5:30 a.m. on March 10 and fired multiple rounds at the building.

People were inside the consulate at the time, but nobody was injured. Police recovered shell casings and found damage to the building’s glass and doors. The vehicle was later discovered abandoned in Scarborough.

An Ontario human rights adjudicator has awarded $7,000 to a former Toronto Metropolitan University teaching assistant who was fired after delivering a prayer referring to the “desecration by the Jews.”

Adjudicator Cyndee Cherniak rejected Ayman Elkasrawy’s allegation that the university fired him because he was Muslim. However, she found his creed played a “small factor” in the university president’s decision to disclose his employment status to B’nai Brith Canada.

Elkasrawy, who worked in the university’s engineering faculty when the institution was still known as Ryerson University, was recorded delivering an Arabic-language prayer at Toronto’s Masjid Toronto mosque in 2016.

The prayer was translated by CIJ News as calling for Jews to be slain “one by one” and for the Al-Aqsa Mosque to be purified from the “filth of the Jews.”

A British Columbia judge has spared a man jail time after he admitted to urinating on his sleeping girlfriend while recording the assault, despite prosecutors seeking up to nine months behind bars.

Martin Joseph Couture pleaded guilty to one count of assault against his former intimate partner. Judge Tina-Marie Bradford instead imposed a 12-month suspended sentence, according to a sentencing decision published this week.

The 2025 assault occurred while the woman was asleep.

“Mr. Couture urinated on her, saturating her clothing and body,” Bradford wrote. When the woman woke up drenched in urine, she noticed cameras positioned around her.

Couture initially told her the incident was “piss play” and claimed she had asked for it. The recording later confirmed she had been asleep.

The victim told the court the assault left her experiencing anger, sadness, shame and a “profound sense of betrayal.”

A driver accused of travelling as fast as 165 km/h on Highway 401 has been acquitted of refusing a breath test after an Ontario judge found his limited English created reasonable doubt that he understood the officer's demand.

Ontario Court Justice Jennifer Trehearne found Jhon Plazas Castillo not guilty of refusing to provide a breath sample following a March 9, 2025 traffic stop.

Trehearne is a recent addition to the bench. She was appointed to the Ontario Court of Justice by the Ford government in June 2025. According to the Ontario government, Trehearne was called to the bar in 2004 and worked primarily as a criminal defence lawyer before becoming a judge.

The case began at approximately 4:50 a.m. when OPP Const. Gavin Rowe spotted Plazas Castillo driving a black Toyota eastbound on Highway 401.

A serial shoplifter who deliberately set fire to a busy Vancouver grocery store as a distraction so he could steal has avoided a jail sentence after B.C. Provincial Court Judge David St. Pierre sentenced him to two years in the community.

Victor Atkinson, 50, pleaded guilty to arson to property after setting the March 30 fire inside Nesters Market in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. He had originally been charged with arson to inhabited property and theft.

Atkinson admitted to police that he started the fire near a stack of toilet paper so he could continue shoplifting to support his drug use.

The consequences were substantial. No one was injured, but the fire caused more than $500,000 in damage and forced the grocery store to close for two weeks. Prosecutors noted the store was packed at the time, with hundreds more people living in apartments above it.

An Ontario judge reduced the prison sentence of a permanent resident convicted of a violent sexual assault, ruling that his near-certain deportation would make his punishment more severe.

Ontario Superior Court Justice Gillian Roberts sentenced 31-year-old Sergio Reyes Loor to four years in prison for sexual assault causing bodily harm, despite finding that five years would otherwise have been a fit sentence.

“The conviction will have devastating immigration consequences, making any punishment I impose more severe than it otherwise would be,” Roberts wrote. “As a result, I decrease the sentence to four years.”

An Ontario Superior Court judge has openly refused to enforce the province’s new cash-bail rules, releasing a woman charged in a human-trafficking case without requiring an upfront cash deposit.

Justice Scott Cowan made the decision Wednesday in Milton, just days after Ontario’s new bail regime took effect.

The accused was arrested with eight others in connection with what Halton Regional Police described as an alleged commercial sexual exploitation network.

Despite the new provincial rules requiring cash deposits to be paid within 48 hours, Cowan released the woman on a $1,000 pledge with no deposit. Her two sureties were each required to pledge $5,000, also without paying cash upfront.

A Nova Scotia judge sentenced a former university football player convicted of sexually assaulting two women to two years behind bars, explicitly stating the sentence would have been “much higher” without an assessment examining the offender’s race and cultural background.

On December 17, 2025, Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Frank Hoskins sentenced 25-year-old Omogbolahan “Teddy” Jegede following his conviction by a jury earlier in 2025 for sexually assaulting two women at St. Francis Xavier University.

The attacks occurred in university residences in Antigonish in 2022 and 2023, approximately five months apart, as reported by the National Post.

A New Brunswick judge has been publicly rebuked and ordered to apologize after a national judicial review panel found he improperly used his authority during a private interaction with a junior lawyer.

The Canadian Judicial Council review panel found Court of King’s Bench Justice Frederick Ferguson engaged in “questionable” conduct when he initiated an unauthorized private conversation with a junior defence lawyer.

The lawyer had gone to the courthouse to obtain an audio recording intended for use in an upcoming motion seeking Ferguson’s recusal from a case.