Accused: Balwinder Badden
Plaintiff: Wife, Son
Place of Trial or Hearing: Provincial Court of BC
Date of Trial and Hearing: August 9, 2010
Courtroom number and name of the Judge: 107, Judge Jardine
Level of court: Provincial Court
Summary of Facts
-On the date of December 13,2009 Mr. Balwinder S. Badden was arrested for Assaulting his Son and possibly his wife. [they hadn't clarified that yet because she wasn't cross examined yet].
-Mr. Badden (accused) was heavily intoxicated when he came upstairs to the living room where Mrs. Badden and their son was already present.
-Mr & Mrs. Badden got into an argument, and in that commotion the daughter; Ramandeep Badden came downstairs to hear her father saying "Hit me! Hit me"
-She saw her mother holding a shovel which the father was trying to grab from the mothers hand, and tells her mother to go upstairs.
-At this point, the son intervened between them, and "fell" on top of the father.
Plaintiff's (or Crown’s) Argument
-Crown was arguing that Mr. Balwinder S. Badden assaulted his son and wife.
Decision and Reasons for Decision
-Court was adjourned to later in the day because there wasn't a second Punjabi interpreter available to help cross examine Mrs. Badden.
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Today, I watched a portion of the trail of R. v. Badden and would like to share my perspective on justice in our courts, and the challenges we face in sometimes carrying out a just trial. The trial started off with defence counsel calling a key witness Ramandeep Badden to the witness box. The defence counsel asked her several questions regarding the police statement she gave, and was cross examining the information she had provided, and what information she claimed had happened later but failed to include it in the police statement after the incident occurred. Most of the trial consisted of Judge Jardine correcting the defence counsels questions. It seemed as if the intention of the Defence Counsel was to confuse the key witness Ramandeep Badden, and asked questions in a form of "did you father think it was snowing outside?" or "was your father trying to grab your mother's hand or the shovel", and the Judge strictly objected to the question format and asked the defence counsel to rephrase his question because a witness can only talk about what occurred in a sense of what she saw and heard and is no authority to talk about what her father was thinking at any given time. I do believe that justice is an ongoing process, and in todays case i do believe that Judge Jardine served justice for Ramandeep Badden because she already appeared to be extremely nervous and the defence counsel was trying to confuse her with asking questions. I believe the length of the long trials is turning into urgent problem because it drags on the suffering of families seeing justice, and at the same time costs them thousands of dollars as well. Just this case against Mr. Balwinder S. Badden has been in trial since December 2009, and even now it doesn't seem to be even close to final decision. It seemed as if the case had already been adjourned to another day over four times already, and the judge mentioned that Ramandeep Badden had to go through pointless questioning almost every single time. The only aspect of the proceedings that disappointed me was the Defence Counsel because he seemed quite nervous even from the start, and he continuously stepped outside his box, only to have the judge correct him in a frustrating manner. I personally believe that he lacked professionalism because it seemed as if he came to the court unprepared which was only wasting courts valuable time but also frustrating the judge but also the witness. Furthermore, i think the effectiveness and efficiency can be obtained if the lawyers are more prepared in court because the court was adjourned till the end of the day because there wasn't a second punjabi interpreter available to interpret for the accused Balwinder S. Badden. OveralI, I was pretty impressed overall with how the judge handled the case even though i had expected the trial to be a lot more smooth (TV effect).
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