Matthew Dwayne Cartwright had been found guilty of the sexual assault once before, but the decision was overturned on appeal and two subsequent attempts to have the case go to trial ended in mistrials. The most recent came last week, when a BC Supreme Court judge halted the proceedings, in part, he said, because a Crown prosecutor used “dangerously stereotypical reasoning” about the sexual assault in her final court submission. Justice Catherine Murray wrote in her decision on November 10 that “due to the volume and extent of the Crown counsel’s improper submissions, I am satisfied that the fairness of the courts has been fatally compromised.” The representative of the Prosecution Service of P.K. Dan McLaughlin told the CBC in an email that after Murray’s ruling, Crown counsel stayed the charge against Cartwright, concluding the case was no longer responsive. the province’s fee approval standards. Those standards, which are some of the toughest in the country, require the evidence to support “a substantial likelihood of conviction” and, if so, that “the public interest requires prosecution.” In most other provinces, as well as at the federal level, a lower level of “reasonable” likelihood of conviction is necessary for fees to be approved. Cartwright’s lawyer, David Ferguson, described the proceedings to date as “extremely frustrating” for his client. “He went through three multi-week trials over the past five years and maintained his innocence throughout. He hoped the jury would vindicate him this time by finding him not guilty,” Ferguson wrote. “The situation is unfortunate for the entire system and all parties involved.”

Previous court records show Cartwright is accused of raping a woman on the morning of Nov. 13, 2016, on a couch in his apartment. The name of the alleged victim is protected by a publication ban. Cartwright had met the alleged victim’s boyfriend on a dating website and they had all gone to a pub in Langley, BC, the night before, according to court documents. The night ended with Cartwright and the two women returning to his apartment and the alleged victim falling asleep on the couch while Cartwright and the victim’s alleged boyfriend went into the bedroom. The alleged victim testified that she woke up in the morning to find Cartwright removing her clothes and then performing various unwanted sexual acts on her while she was frozen in fear. Cartwright claimed she consented. A jury found Cartwright guilty in 2018 at his first trial and sentenced to 30 months behind bars. But this decision overturned in 2021 after a panel of appellate courts found that the original trial judge had not given a substantive answer to a jury question. A second trial in April 2022 ended in a mistrial due to the Crown’s improper cross-examination of Cartwright, according to Murray’s ruling. The judge wrote that the trial was “fatally compromised” by the Crown’s improper submissions. (Ben Nelms/CBC) In her decision to end the most recent trial, Murray presented a list of damaging remarks that prosecutor Wendy Dawson had made to the jury during her closing arguments. The judge said the Crown attorney had “repeatedly invited the jury to engage in prohibited reasoning to assess credibility, including that only romantic or amorous sex is consensual, and that the complainant reacted exactly as you would expect a victim to do of sexual assault and did everything one can expect from a victim after a sexual assault.” The decision goes on to say that, “It has long been recognized that there is no ‘usual’ way for victims of sexual assault to behave during or after an assault. Nor are there any ‘usual’ types of sexual assaults.” Murray wrote that while sexual assault stereotypes are often used against victims, in this case, they worked against the defendants, unfairly influencing the jury to disbelieve Cartwright’s evidence. Also disputed were Dawson’s repeated references to Cartwright’s statement to police during her closing, even though the statement was not made as part of the Crown’s case, according to the ruling. There were also problems with statements Dawson made about the alleged victim’s credibility, Murray said.