IGNORANCE NO EXCUSE FOR JUDGE.
It’s right there in the Criminal Code of Canada, that big book with which Robin Camp apparently had so little familiarity, Section 19: “Ignorance of the law by a person who commits an offence is not an excuse for committing that offence.”
In Latin, the dead language so beloved by lawyers, it is “Ignorantia legis neminem excusat,” or “Ignorance of the law excuses no one.”
So, you drove 50 klicks above the speed limit because you didn’ t know exactly what the limit was? No excuse. You drove drunk because you thought the acceptable blood/al cohol thingy was different? Doesn’t count. You hauled off and smacked a guy who insulted your friend because you thought it was OK to defend someone else? Matters nought.
That’s how it works in the criminal courts of this country: Ignorance of the law is no excuse or defence.
And yet Camp, a $314,000-a-year judge of the Federal Court of Canada and former judge of the Alberta Provincial Court, is essentially asking a panel of the Canadian Judicial Council to accept that, as he put it Friday, he didn’t know what he didn’t know and therefore should be if not forgiven, allowed to continue on the bench.
The 64-year-old’s conduct in a 2014 sexual assault trial, this while he was still on the provincial court here, is being reviewed at a CJC hearing.
The panel will make a recommendation to the full council whether he should be removed from the bench or not.
At issue are not just the extraordinary remarks Camp made during the course of that trial — particularly to the young female complainant, of whom he infamously asked, “Why couldn’t you just keep your knees together?” — but the naked biases they revealed and arguably his misunderstanding of the law.
Camp was a construction and engineering lawyer with a medium-sized Calgary firm when he applied to the provincial court. He had the requisite political connections; a partner at JSS Barristers was Robert Hawkes, the ex- husband of then new Alberta premier Alison Redford. Redford and Hawkes were on sufficiently friendly terms that long after their split, he headed her transition team when she took over as premier.
In March of 2012, Camp was appointed and promptly assigned to the criminal division, though, as he put it in questioning by panel member Nova Scotia Associate Chief Justice Deborah Smith, his Canadian criminal law experience “was non- existent.”
(He spent some time doing criminal work in his native South Africa as a young lawyer. He immigrated to Canada in 1998.)
Three years later, in June of 2015, he was bumped up to the Federal Court, the sort of en-famille appointment that bypasses the slight scrutiny of the federal Judicial Advisory Committees that lend the judge- picking process a sheen of respectability.
In any case, as Camp acknowledged in his brief testimony Friday — he spent 27 minutes in chief and about twice as long in cross- examination — upon his appointment to the bench, he didn’t do much to fill in the chasm in his knowledge about criminal law.
He would read the applicable Criminal Code sections and various leading cases. He went to “new judges school,” as it’s called. He attended a handful of other courses. He asked lots of questions of his more experienced colleagues, who were very generous, he said, because they knew “my knowledge base was very minimal.”
But, as he told Newfoundland and Labrador Chief Justice Raymond Whalen, another panel member, he knew “the onus is on the judge” to properly prepare himself.
Whalen also asked Camp if he’d give the same type of advice to his sons as he gave to the young man, Alexander Scott Wagar, whom he acquitted of sexual assault.
Camp told Wagar he needed to be “gentle and patient” with women, careful “to protect yourself,” and asked him to please tell his friends.
What he told Whalen was this: “I think it’s important for a father to tell his son to respect women, not to do anything to a woman she doesn’t want done, be sure you’re not doing more than the woman wants.”
Mostly, Camp spent his time in the witness box apologizing.
He was “very sorry” and “deeply sorry;” he regretted using “facetious words”; he said “my concept of what I did wrong has grown” ( he is now apparently on level three, which means he discovered he had unconscious biases); and he called his language “abusive and inappropriate” and said it was born of “deep-rooted prejudice” he didn’t recognize at the time.
And despite all that, when the de facto prosecutor, Mar- jorie Hickey, stood up to begin her cross-examination, Camp grabbed the reins and interrupted to say, “Ms. Hickey, before you start, I haven’t actually apologized yet. Somehow, the occasion hasn’t arisen.
“I have more apologies to make. “May I go ahead?” And he did, apologizing in order to the young complainant (“The panel has seen her,” he said, with what sounded an awful lot like condescension. “She’s a fragile personality.”), to all victims of sexual assault, to Canadians (who, he said, “deserve better of their judges”), to the judiciary and to his family.
There’s no question that Camp had the very bad luck to have been found out at a time when sexual assault is very much on the public radar, and that he ought not to be made to pay for the sins and failures of the justice system.
And his story has illustrated some of those failures, chiefly the cronyism that still permeates the selection of judges, and that the criminal law requires a skill set that may be beyond the capacity of the ordinary construction lawyer.
It ’s f unny, but f or all the acknowledged gaps in Robin Camp’s knowledge of the criminal courts, he was not so different Friday from every defendant I’ve ever seen in the witness box: deeply sorry at having been caught and full of chipper promises to do better in the future, just like every other mook.