CRIMES, COURTS, AND COMMENTARY
Interviews, current events, recommendations, and more --
all geared to the criminal law student community.
all geared to the criminal law student community.
4/20/2022 0 Comments Opinion: Increased Transcript Fees Are the Newest Symptom of Ontario’s Access to Justice ProblemCLSA Staff
What if I told you that for the exams occurring next month, the only option for printing these materials would be to print on campus, for $7.10 per page? What if you did not have a Professional Student Line of Credit? What if you were surviving on less than $23,000 per year in the city of Toronto, where rent alone can easily exceed that? What if what was at stake was not a “P” versus an “HH” grade on an exam, but your innocence and freedom?
I sat down with Eric Neubauer — a criminal defence lawyer, a volunteer counsel with Downtown Legal Services’ (DLS) appeals program, and one of the Toronto Directors of the Criminal Lawyers’ Association (CLA) — to discuss the new amendment to the Administration of Justice Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. A.6 (“Act”) filed on March 2, 2022. This amendment will raise the cost of court transcripts from $4.30 per page to between $6.30 to $7.10 per page. As future legal practitioners, each and every student in our Faculty should be concerned about these costs on defendants. They do not just exist in a filed statute. They have real implications on the functioning of the criminal justice system, and they place some of the most marginalized individuals in our community at risk of great injustice.
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