2026 G. Arthur Martin Award Winner, Justice David M. Paciocco

Toronto, ON, August 6, 2026 – The Criminal Lawyers’ Association (CLA) has awarded the prestigious G. Arthur Martin Criminal Justice Medal to the Honourable David M. Paciocco. The award will be presented Saturday, November 21, 2026, 1 to 3 p.m. at a special luncheon ceremony. 

David Paciocco’s contributions to criminal law as an author, scholar, professor, litigator and jurist have been nothing short of extraordinary. One of Canada’s pre-eminent authorities on criminal law and the law of evidence in particular, David has spent decades trying to achieve a more principled, better run, and better understood criminal justice system. 

David spent most of his teaching career at the University of Ottawa, where he started in 1982, and was a professor for almost 30 years. David’s ability to distill complicated legal issues into understandable, workable concepts soon became hallmarks of his teaching and academic writing.  David has published over 130 articles and written four books, including Getting Away with Murder, a comprehensive review of the Canadian criminal justice system that was intended to help restore public credibility to the criminal justice system while also advancing a number of thought-provoking ideas for reform. For his publishing efforts, David has received numerous awards, including the Mundell Medal in 2002 for “outstanding contribution to legal writing” and a Donner Prize in 1999 for writing in Canadian Public Policy. Just as an author alone, David has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada in more than 80 different cases. Meanwhile, The Law of Evidence, co-written first with Lee Stuesser and then later with his daughter Palma – and widely considered the gold standard for a treatise on evidence – has been judicially cited more than 600 times.

From 1990-1994, David worked as an Assistant Crown Attorney. After that, and up until 2011, David was defence counsel, doing primarily appellate advocacy and white-collar crime and often working alongside last year’s G. Arthur Martin winner, Michael Edelson, and Vincent Clifford (now Justice Clifford). During his career as a litigator, David appeared as counsel before the Supreme Court of Canada, Court of Appeal for Ontario, British Columbia Court of Appeal, Saskatchewan Court of Appeal and appeared frequently in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice and Ontario Court of Justice. David also acted as appellate counsel before the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and as Commission Counsel to the Honourable Roger Salhany in the Taman Inquiry, a provincial public inquiry in Manitoba that investigated a botched police investigation and subsequent prosecution of a Winnipeg police officer. David made numerous appearances before Parliamentary Committees.  He was legal consultant in a wide range of criminal, evidentiary and administrative law matters, including with the Canadian Judicial Council, the Federation of Law Societies, and both the Federal and Provincial Ombudsman offices. He has also appeared as counsel for the Criminal Lawyers’ Association, the Canadian Association of Defence Counsel, and various media organizations.

In R. v. Julliet O’Neill, David was part of a high-profile legal team that managed to strike down a provision in the Security of Information Act, which had permitted arbitrary designations of classified information to impede dissent and freedom of the press. In R. v. Liban Hussain, David managed through an abuse of process argument and constitutional challenge to the United Nations Act to inspire a close and critical government examination of the United States of America’s request to extradite Luban Hussein. After doing so, the government refused the request and removed Mr. Hussain from Canada’s terrorism and no fly lists. In R. v. O’Connor, David argued a non-disclosure issue successfully, and the Supreme Court of Canada largely adopted the disclosure standards developed in his factum, while also adopting the test for abuse of process that David had developed while working as an academic in New Zealand years earlier. In R. v. Mills, although s.278 was not struck down, the Supreme Court of Canada accepted the criticisms David helped to identify in the statute, which the Court then addressed through statutory interpretation, before watering down much of the literal language in s.278 and thereby increasing the prospect of defence counsel accessing certain records.

In 2011, David was appointed a judge of the Ontario Court of Justice. During his relatively short time on that bench, he had over 60 published or reported decisions, including R. v. Michael, where he found the victim surcharge provision to be unconstitutional and contrary to s.12 of the Charter – a decision the Supreme Court of Canada leaned heavily on when it struck down this same provision in R. v. Boudreault years later.

In 2017, David was appointed a judge of the Court of Appeal for Ontario, where he still sits today. He has composed hundreds of decisions encompassing all facets of the criminal law and evidence while sitting as a judge on that court. Some of the more notable decisions that David has contributed to include: R. v. Sullivan (striking down the limitation of the extreme intoxication defence); R. v. Booth (important warrant, and search and seizure case) R. v. Joseph (striking down the mandatory minimum sentence for material benefits); R. v. Morris (setting the framework for considering anti-black racism at sentencing); R. v. Kiss (credibility evaluations); R. v. Dudhi (clarifying the framework for finding racial profiling); R. v. Reimer (assessing the relevance of evidence of other sexual activity); and R. v. J.W. (dealing with myths and stereotypes in sexual offence prosecutions).  More recently, David also began supervising self-represented inmate appeals as the Court’s Designated Inmate Appeal Judge.

David has given hundreds of presentations at professional and judicial conferences in his career  and has sat on editorial boards for no less than five law journals, including the Canadian Criminal Law Review. David’s research, scholarship, advocacy, and now even his own jurisprudence, have all shaped how courts approach expert testimony, the principled exception to the hearsay rule, and the exclusion of evidence.

For more information on the G. Arthur Martin Criminal Justice Medal, including the list of past recipients, please visit https://criminallawyers.ca/about-us/awards/.

The Criminal Lawyers’ Association is a not-for-profit organization representing more than 1,800 defence lawyers in Canada. It is the largest organization of its kind in Canada. The mandate of the association is to serve as a strong voice for criminal lawyers and other stakeholders concerned with the quality of criminal justice in Canada.