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Case summaries are prepared by the Office of the Registrar of the Supreme Court of Canada (Law Branch). Please note that summaries are not provided to the Judges of the Court. They are placed on the Court file and website for information purposes only.

Criminal law – Whether the Court of Appeal erred in failing to decide that the trial judge erred in law by not directing the jury to ignore the applicant’s incriminatory out of court statements if they had a reasonable doubt that his in court testimony denying his guilt was true.

Mr. Ratté’s wife disappeared on August 18, 1997, and was never seen or heard from again. Her body was never found. In 2007, the Unsolved Homicide Unit mounted an undercover “Mr. Big”-style operation targeting Mr. Ratté. During the operation, he was told, falsely, that police had images of him disposing of his wife’s body, and that he needed to clean it up. He was assured that “Mr. Big” could help him do so if he gave a true account of what happened. On September 27, 2008, Mr. Ratté told Mr. Big that he had killed his wife. Over the next weeks, he provided details of the murder and disposal of the body to members of the undercover operation. Mr. Ratté was arrested on December 5, 2008. During a 5-hour interrogation, he admitted to shooting his wife. At trial, however, he denied having participated in the killing, arguing that it was possible that his wife, disillusioned with him and their relationship, had disappeared, taking up a new life. The trial judge did not charge the jury that, if Mr. Ratté’s in-court testimony left them with a reasonable doubt, they had to reject the out-of-court statements, as had been given in R. v. MacKenzie, [1993] 1 S.C.R. 212.

The jury convicted Mr. Ratté of one count of second degree murder. The appeal was heard on June 5, 2012. On June 8, 2012, the Supreme Court of Canada released R. v. Mayuran, 2012 SCC 31, which indicated that the MacKenzie instruction was required where the credibility of the conflicting statements goes directly to the ultimate issues in dispute. The issue was not among the grounds on appeal, and was not addressed. The Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal.