A Toronto judge’s decision to permit a clinical psychologist’s testimony on the “neurobiology of trauma” constituted a legal error that demands a new sex assault trial for ex-pop star Jacob Hoggard, a defence lawyer has told Ontario’s highest court. Permitting such testimony could lead to criminal trials becoming lengthy “battles of the experts,” Gerald Chan warned a three-judge panel of the Ontario Court of Appeal on Wednesday. The “typical division of labour” at a trial is that expert witnesses give evidence in areas that lie within their special field of expertise, the lawyer argued, while trial judges give instructions to the jury on the legal principles that ought to govern their reasoning process.
“But in this case, the trial judged mixed these two different aspects of a criminal trial together into what we say was an unusual and highly prejudicial cocktail.” Crown attorney Catherine Weiler countered that Dr. Lori Haskell’s evidence was atypical, the trial judge was right to admit it “as an arrow pointing away from legally wrong myths” and stereotypes around sex assault, “not as an arrow pointing towards credibility or conviction.
” The court is currently deliberating on . In 2022, of sexual assault causing bodily harm in connection with an incident involving an Ottawa woman. She testified that he raped her over several hours in a Toronto hotel room in 2016 when she was in her early 20s.
The jury acquitted him of raping and groping a teena.