The Supreme Court of Canada has upheld a new trial for a man tried in Alberta after concluding that the judge who convicted him of second-degree murder improperly used a statement made outside court to establish when he was left alone with the victim.
In R. v. Saddleback, 2026 SCC 18, eight judges dismissed the Crown’s appeal without costs on May 22. The decision leaves intact the Alberta Court of Appeal’s order quashing Dylon Saddleback’s conviction and directing a new trial. Justice Côté dissented and would have restored the conviction.
Writing for the majority, Justice O’Bonsawin rejected the argument that describing the statement as circumstantial evidence avoided the hearsay problem. What mattered was whether its value in the trial judge’s reasoning depended on accepting what the speaker said as true.
A phone call became central to the timeline
The prosecution arose from a death outside a trailer in central Alberta in July 2020. Saddleback and the victim had been socializing with a group whose other members later left for a nearby birthday party. Saddleback argued at trial that someone else could have arrived after the group left and committed the killing.
The timing of the group’s departure was therefore important to whether Saddleback had the exclusive opportunity to kill the victim. Members of the group gave inconsistent accounts of when they left, although they testified that the victim was on the phone and Saddleback was in the trailer as they departed.
The victim’s girlfriend testified about a call with him lasting 10 to 20 minutes between 10 and 10:30 p.m. During the Crown’s questioning, an objection prompted a separate admissibility hearing about what the victim had said concerning who was present. The Crown abandoned its application to have that evidence admitted.
Later, defence counsel asked the girlfriend in cross-examination whether the victim had said he was being “ditched by those guys.” After being taken to her preliminary inquiry testimony, she accepted that account. The statement about being left behind—not the earlier statement about who was present—became the focus of the Supreme Court appeal. No admissibility hearing had determined whether that later statement could be used for its truth.
The trial judge linked the group’s departure to this particular phone call and concluded that Saddleback was left alone with the victim shortly before the death. The majority said the statement helped establish the timeline used to reject the defence theory of another assailant.
Calling evidence circumstantial does not resolve hearsay concerns
Hearsay is a statement made outside court that is used to prove the truth of what it asserts. It is presumptively inadmissible because the absence of the person who made it can make its truthfulness difficult to assess. Exceptions exist, including the principled exception requiring necessity and sufficient reliability to be established on a balance of probabilities.
The Crown argued that the trial judge had used the statement only to corroborate other witnesses’ evidence that the victim was on the phone when they left. O’Bonsawin said that explanation still depended on the statement being true: if the group was not actually leaving when the victim said it was, the statement would not establish the timing or corroborate the witnesses for that purpose.
The distinction was not between direct and circumstantial evidence. Allowing a statement to prove its contents merely because the inference was labelled circumstantial would bypass the hearsay rule, the majority said.
O’Bonsawin did not rule out every possible use of the statement. A hearsay exception or a different, legitimate non-hearsay purpose might have justified reliance on it. But neither the trial reasons nor the record allowed the reviewing court to reconstruct such an explanation, and the Crown had not argued for a hearsay exception.
Reasons had to disclose the basis for reliance
The majority acknowledged that trial judges are presumed to know the law and that appellate courts must read their reasons in context. Mere ambiguity is not enough to justify intervention. Here, however, the reasons showed reliance on the statement for its truth; any alternative lawful basis was unexplained and could not be discerned from the record.
O’Bonsawin also noted that the oral conviction reasons occupied just over four transcribed pages despite multiple forensic experts and inconsistent witness testimony. She stressed the functional and contextual assessment of reasons, while questioning whether reasons this short in such a case met the goals of transparency and public confidence.
The Crown did not invoke the Criminal Code’s curative proviso, either in the Court of Appeal or the Supreme Court. That provision can allow a conviction to stand despite a legal error where the Crown establishes the absence of prejudice. The Crown had not argued, even implicitly, that there was no substantial wrong or miscarriage of justice or that the evidence of guilt was so overwhelming that the verdict would have been unchanged.
The court could not apply the proviso on its own initiative, O’Bonsawin said. The majority therefore did not decide whether the remaining evidence could have supported the same result without the error. It also found it unnecessary to decide Saddleback’s separate arguments that the trial judge had materially misapprehended evidence and that the reasons were otherwise insufficient.
Côté read the reasons differently
Côté said the disagreement concerned the trial judge’s use of the evidence, not the governing hearsay principles. Reading the reasons with the whole record, she concluded that the statement was used to assess witness reliability rather than to prove its contents. She relied in part on the judge’s awareness of hearsay concerns and on other testimony establishing the group’s movements.
She also rejected Saddleback’s separate challenges to the reasons and the treatment of the evidence. In her view, the physical evidence and witness testimony explained the conviction, and the trial judge could conclude that the girlfriend had adopted her earlier account in full. She emphasized deference to the trial judge’s assessment rather than treating another possible interpretation as a material error.
Côté would have set aside the Court of Appeal judgment and restored the second-degree murder conviction. The majority’s dismissal instead preserved the order for a new trial.
Source: R. v. Saddleback, 2026 SCC 18.
