Fentanyl Sentencing Challenges

Jacqueline Halliburn graduated from UBC Law with a JD in 2013. She summered and articled for Sutherland Jette, a boutique criminal defence firm in Vancouver. In 2014, upon her call to the bar, she relocated to Northern Manitoba to work for the Crown. Her office handled 16 circuits which together constitute one of the highest violent crime rates in the country. As such, Jacqueline was very lucky to have experience with jury trials, homicides, and complex applications very early on in her career. Within 3 months of her call, she was appointed the designated Child Victims Crown for Northern Manitoba, specializing in the prosecution of child abuse cases in the north, a position she held for 3 years.

In June of 2017, Jacqueline accepted a position as a junior criminal associate at Filkow Law in Vancouver, and has been there since. In addition to handling the majority of the firm’s violent files, she has also become well-versed in both criminal and administrative driving law, and is slowly but surely developing her experience with the CDSA.

Filkow Law is currently handling a number of fentanyl cases and so they wanted to do the research on this topic in particular in the hopes that we can all become experts together as the law in this area gets tougher and tougher for us. Jacqueline’s hope is that this presentation gives us some useful tools to help protect our clients at the sentencing stage of a fentanyl file.