WEARY GEARSWelcome to Weary Gears
Hi there!
However you found this page, thanks for reading. I am a graduate student studying Canadian criminal law. My research focuses on criminal procedure and especially on the routine adjudicative procedures that have gone largely overlooked for the last couple of decades.
About Me
Prior to being a grad student, I had a bit of a diverse career. I spent a couple of years developing software for an ecommerce company and went on to manage a team of similar-minded developers there. Before my software days, I was a prosecution-side lawyer that prosecuted mostly illicit drug and regulatory offences.
I enjoy using data and modelling to learn about systems and how they’re performing. I find the hunt for complex interactions and feedback loops fascinating and I find the challenge of communicating about those complex systems so that the humans involved can make better decisions particularly satisfying.
About the Project
I plan to spend the next year or two (2023-2024) in the backs of the remand and administrative courtrooms around Ontario (and, time-permitting, elsewhere in the country) so that I can better understand how the pre-trial processes work, how they differ between regions, and how they break down. I expect to collect thousands of data points with the eventual goal of developing a sophisticated enough understanding to create a simple simulated courthouse. I don’t expect this simulation to answer questions about the “best” way to run a courthouse but instead to provide insights into where there might be bottlenecks and to look for ways to challenge some of the assumptions we have about how these processes interact.
About the Journal
I have given the journal the title Weary Gears because these low-profile processes make up the fundamental machinery of bringing cases to conclusion. But they are tired. They have been asked to absorb the complexity of every Charter argument, to compensate for any human mistake or omission, and to incorporate technological changes without much evolution since at least the 1980s.
This journal will be a collection of short articles and essays about the research as it goes on. The objective is to get these ideas down in writing while they are fresh and provide a way for me to draft things longer than a tweet. I will try to publish at least one short piece a month. While these posts are probably only going to be of interest to folks involved in the criminal justice system or its study, I will try to make the content accessible to anyone and provide links to source documents or data. That said, I don’t plan on necessarily keeping this journal up-to-date on current events or breaking news. If you’re looking for a hot take on an SCC case, I would look elsewhere. If you’ve read this far and this all sounds interesting to you, I’d suggest subscribing to the RSS feed with your favorite RSS reader or getting in touch at info@wearygears.ca and I’ll let you know when I post something new.
-WG