The longest trial in Hamilton history has ended with a stay of proceedings and the accused going free because the case took too long.

It was the fault of the Crown attorney and "lack of institutional resources" that R vs. Safdar — the domestic violence case involving three family members accused of torture and abuse — exceeded the time limit by two months, ruled Justice Andrew Goodman.

"I impose a stay of proceedings," Goodman told the court Monday morning, 14 months after the bizarre judge-alone trial began.

"This case is one of the most, if not the most, difficult and challenging cases I've had to consider in my tenure as a jurist," began Goodman, who also presided over the Tim Bosma murder trial.

It was expected Goodman would begin the day by dealing with an application made by the defence for a stay due to the delays in the trial.

If he dismissed the application, he would then render his verdicts.

It took Goodman 15 minutes to toss the case entirely. He was already gone from the courtroom before it seemed to register with the Safdars that they no longer face charges.

Adeel Safdar, a 38-year-old scientist, was charged with assault, assault with a weapon, assault bodily harm, threatening death and aggravated assault upon his wife, Dr. Sara Salim.

His mother, Shaheen Safdar, 63, faced the same charges.

His brother, Aatif Safdar, 36, was charged with assault bodily harm, assault with a weapon, assault and threatening death.

The Safdars were accused of violent crimes against Sara, a medical doctor, while she lived with them in Binbrook. The allegations included branding her with an iron, breaking her jaw and forcing her to carve death threats against Adeel and their daughter into her own leg with a knife.

The Safdars refuted the allegations, saying Sara was mentally ill and caused all the injuries to herself. They said she invented stories of abuse to win back her young daughter in a custody dispute.

This is among the first trials in Canada to be stayed due to "midtrial delay" under time limits imposed by the 2016 Jordan decision, says Nader Hasan, who represented Shaheen.

Usually, the delay is between the arrest and the start of the trial.

"We all have a constitutional right in this country to a speedy trial," Hasan said in an interview. "Justice delayed is justice denied."

Hasan and Lauren Wilhelm, who along with Dean Paquette represented Adeel, applauded Goodman's "courage" in granting the stay.

They said his decision would likely not be popular with the public who would see their clients and Aatif (who was self-represented) as "getting off on a technicality."

Hasan acknowledged the Safdars have faced very public allegations and their reputations have been "sullied."

"I'm hopeful that this will be the first step in putting their lives back together," he says.

The Safdars themselves declined comment.

Sara, who is practising medicine in the United States, has not been in the courtroom since she was on the witness stand at the start of the trial. Contacted after the stay, she declined comment.

Adeel and Sara are in the midst of a Unified Family Court battle over custody of their daughter, who currently lives with all three Safdars in their Hamilton home. Sara pays support to Adeel, who works in a fast-food restaurant.

In the Jordan decision, the Supreme Court of Canada set limits on the time between arrest and a resolution. For Superior Court (where the Safdar case was heard), the limit is 30 months.

"Timely justice is one of the hallmarks of a free and democratic society," according to that decision.

One month into the trial, the Safdar case reached the 30-month mark.

Throughout the trial, the possibility of an 11B application loomed. Several times, however, the defence agreed to waive their 11B right and carry on.

That changed last month when the defence brought an 11B application and a unique remedy: if the judge was planning to find the accused not guilty, he should go ahead and do so. But if he was looking to find them guilty, he should stay the case instead.

Goodman, in his 64 pages of reasons for granting the application, says he rejected that proposal.

He did, however, accept that the trial had gone on too long. Getting to that decision took a great deal of law and math.

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First, he calculated the total number of months from arrest to the end of the trial: 43.5. Then, based on days of submissions, he had to decide how much of the delay was waived by the defence (5.5 months), how much was caused by exceptional circumstances such as illness and underestimation of the trial time (six months) to arrive at 32 months of delay.

That extra two months falls at the feet of assistant Crown attorney Jeff Levy, and is why Goodman granted the stay.

During the pretrial, Levy's father passed away. During the trial, Levy became unwell and his doctor ordered bed rest.

Goodman did not consider those unforeseeable delays as counting against the Crown.

He did, however, dock Levy for underestimating the length of the trial (Levy predicted four to six weeks) and taking too long with witnesses.

"I am not entirely convinced that during the trial, the Crown embarked on a reasonable course of action to mitigate the delays when possible," wrote Goodman. "There were occasions where I questioned in my own mind how some of the evidence adduced by the prosecution was material to the live issues."

Levy has declined comment.

The judge also considered "systemic limitations" such as scheduling and courtroom availability as inexcusable delays that pushed the trial past its limit.

Goodman also decided this case was not complicated enough to justify its length.

One case he considered was the first-degree murder trial of Dellen Millard and Mark Smich, when a jury found them guilty of killing Laura Babcock. (They had already been found guilty in Bosma's murder.)

In the Babcock case there were 217 civilian witnesses, 260 police officers, 57 seized electronic devices, 17 pretrial motions and a trial scheduled for four months.

The Safdar case was not of the same "order of magnitude," Goodman wrote. But he added: "There is no doubt that this trial involves very disturbing facts giving rise to extremely serious allegations of prolonged domestic assaults and abuse. Indeed, this case is far from what can be described as a 'typical domestic violence' case."

In another unusual move, Goodman has pre-emptively decided his verdicts regarding the Safdars. They are written, sealed and locked away. If the Crown successfully appeals the stay and it is overturned, a new trial "may neither be required nor necessary," Goodman wrote. His verdicts can simply be delivered.

The Crown law office in Toronto has 30 days to appeal.

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