No right to a lawyer during interrogation, Supreme Court rules

[Retired AF Guy]

I did, yes.

Like I said, the Justice system is an advesarial one...one side pitted against the other. That's not a bad thing, in fact, it works so well all Western Democracies use it.

Actually, I don't think that's true. The adversarial system is pretty well unique to the UK and members/former members of the British Empire/Commonwealth (Australia, India, Canada, New Zealand, United States, etc). 

 

[stukirkpatrick]

I don't get what the big uproar here is.  The Supreme Court just upheld what has always been the norm in Canada up to this point.  I recall that one of the Justices commented that Canada shouldn't just adopt large sections of American law without any real thought put into why.

I disagree that the police and crown can always get by based on physical evidence and witnesses alone.  The real world isn't CSI and you can't always rely on the clues if they are circumstantial.  Even with a lot of evidence in an investigation, having the suspect confess can lead to other benefits, such as locating the bodies of victims, and linking unsolved crimes.

Just look at the recent publicized examples of Robert Pickton and the former Colonel Williams. 

As for the worry of falsely-elicited confessions, there is a lot of training and effort made to ensure this does not happen.