An Agreed Upon Statement of Facts
Posted By Randy on June 1, 2025
Image © Amy Baker 2020 (instagram.com/amy_louisebaker)
“It’s a beautiful thing to refuse to forget…” ~ Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Fencing Master
What ho oh Weary Pilgrim, and welcome to this watch fire hard by the Yawning Rabbit Hole of Confusion. First, something to clarify at least the legal definition of today’s headline:
“More than 90 per cent of criminal convictions in Canada are not the result of a trial, but of a guilty plea. As I wrote a couple of years ago, people plead guilty for many reasons, only one of which is that they are actually guilty. But that’s another matter.
“Every guilty plea involves the creation of something called an ‘agreed statement of facts.’ The Crown and the defence agree that the set of facts in this statement are true, and those facts are then read in court as justifying both the charge and the plea of guilty …
“The thing I learned from my experience is that the key word in the phrase ‘agreed statement of facts’ is not ‘facts,’ but ‘agreed.’ The key to the statement is that the two sides agree to it and that it contains enough information to justify the charges and the guilty plea. It may contain statements that one side would not regard as factual, and it certainly will omit facts that most outside observers would see as highly relevant to the charge. In many cases the ‘statement of facts’ will not provide an adequate understanding about what happened and why. It was quite unnerving to me that the only official account of what happened in relation to my charges was so limited, if not misleading …” ~ What ‘agreed statement of facts’ really means by David Dorson, LAW360 Canada
A shortcut then, whereby the “official” record of events is built up from a framework of mutually palatable fictions wherein “agreement” may be more inferred than real, and “palatable” for some participants may be more of the order of, “It’ll fill you up if you can choke it down.” (more…)