This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
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The hearing into a senior Toronto police officer charged in relation to G20 “kettling” incidents has now been handed over to former Ontario Superior Court justice, 79-year-old John Hamilton, after former Ontario Superior Court justice, Peter Grossi, announced last week that he would not be able to continue due to a medical issue.
Judge Hamilton has been repeatedly rebuked by the Ontario Court of Appeal during his 19 years on the bench. Hamilton was a former well-known defence lawyer who often represented police officers in both court and before the public complaints board. Hamilton was appointed a Toronto judge in 1991 and retired in 2010 since he had reached mandatory retirement age of 75. Hamilton is famous among the legal community for his freewheeling remarks as he once called a high school student testifying through an Urdu translator “brain dead.”
Judge Hamilton’s record shows that he has had 18 decisions overturned by the Ontario Court of Appeal during his tenure as a judge. Most of the times, judicial error was cited and sometime Hamilton’s conduct in court. In response to a 2004 case where Hamilton convicted a man of aggravated assault, the province’s top court ordered a retrial. At the time, the panel of three judges wrote of Hamilton in their decision, saying that “(w)e are not satisfied that he ever came to grips with the critical issue, the one that prevails in every case, whether the Crown has proved the guilt of the accused beyond a reasonable doubt.”
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