La Poursuite peut utiliser les antécédents judiciaires d'un accusé pour démontrer qu'il n'est pas psychologiquement détenu lors de l'intervention policière et attaquer sa crédibilité

R. v. Poole, 2015 BCCA 464 

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[18]        On the voir dire the Crown introduced Mr. Poole’s criminal record to prove that he had experience dealing with police officers at the time of the offence – a factor identified in R. v. Grant, 2009 SCC 32, as relevant in assessing whether an individual has been psychologically detained. The trial judge also made use of the record to assess Mr. Poole’s credibility (at para. 57):

Secondly, he has a lengthy criminal record involving offences of moral turpitude. I conclude that Mr. Poole has little regard for the law including the import of taking an oath. [Emphasis added.]

[19]        Mr. Poole acknowledges that once the record was before the court, it was open to the trial judge to consider it in assessing credibility. But he submits that the trial judge went too far in using it to conclude that Mr. Poole had a propensity to lie. Mr. Poole argues there were no convictions for perjury or other offences that would support such a finding. This was described by counsel for Mr. Poole as impermissible ‘propensity reasoning’.

[20]        Using a criminal record to infer that a witness lacks credibility is precisely the sort of reasoning which the law permits. As Dickson C.J.C. states in R. v. Corbett, 1988 CanLII 80 (SCC), [1988] 1 S.C.R. 670 at 686, citing with approval a passage from State v. Duke, 123 A.2d 745 (N.H. 1956) at 756:

What a person is often determines whether he should be believed. When a defendant voluntarily testifies in a criminal case, he asks the jury to accept his word. No sufficient reason appears why the jury should not be informed what sort of person is asking them to take his word. In transactions of everyday life this is probably the first thing that they would wish to know. So it seems to us in a real sense that when a defendant goes onto a stand, “he takes his character with him . . . .” Lack of trustworthiness may be evinced by his abiding and repeated contempt for laws which he is legally and morally bound to obey, as in the case at bar, though the violations are not concerned solely with crimes involving “dishonesty and false statement.” [Emphasis added.]

[21]        The trial judge was entitled to draw an inference of untrustworthiness from Mr. Poole’s criminal record which stretched back to 1987 and included seven convictions for robbery, a serious offence which Ryan J.A. described as “highly relevant” to an accused’s credibility: R. v. Madrusan, 2005 BCCA 609 at para. 48.

[22]        In summary on this ground of appeal, in my view the trial judge did not err when he concluded that Mr. Poole’s criminal record detracted from his credibility.