Scarborough Criminal Defence Lawyers

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This page is about Scarborough, Ontario, the east end of Toronto, and about the people who will make decisions about your criminal case. Not the buildings first, the people. A charge laid in Scarborough passes through the hands of an officer, an officer in charge, a justice of the peace, a Crown, a judge, and eventually you. Each of them can do something different to your file. Here is who they are, in the order you meet them.

By Fadi Matthew Kazandji, Founding Partner, Kazandji Law. Updated September 2026.

The officer who stopped you in Scarborough, and the first decision they make

Every criminal case starts with a person rather than a building. Somebody in uniform formed a view about you, and a series of other people will now form views of their own. Understanding who decides what is the quickest way to work out where you can actually influence the outcome, and where you cannot.

The first of them is the officer. Before any of this reaches a court they make a judgment about what happened and what to do about it. That judgment is made fast, usually on incomplete information, often under pressure from whatever else is running that shift. They may take no action at all. They may proceed by way of an appearance notice that sends you home with a date. Or they may arrest.

What you do in those few minutes matters more than almost anything else you will do in the case. You have to identify yourself. Past that, you are entitled to speak to a lawyer and you are entitled not to answer questions. Those two rights are the whole of your protection at that stage, and they are remarkably easy to give away by accident, usually by trying to be helpful. Explanations offered at the roadside get written down. They get written down imperfectly. And they reappear months later in a disclosure package as an admission you never thought you were making.

Ask for a lawyer, say so clearly, and then stop talking. It is not rude and it is not an indication of guilt. It is the single instruction every criminal lawyer in Ontario gives, and we give it because we spend our working lives reading what happens when people do the opposite.

Here is the full cast, and what each of them controls.

41, 42 or 43 Division: which station is holding your file, and why it matters

Scarborough is policed by three Toronto Police Service divisions.

• 41 Division, 2222 Eglinton Avenue East, Toronto M1K 2M2.
• 42 Division, 242 Milner Avenue East, Toronto M1S 5C4.
• 43 Division, 4331 Lawrence Avenue East, Toronto M1E 2T4.

There is no 40 Division, whatever you may have read somewhere. The Toronto Police Service has sixteen divisions in total, numbered 11, 12, 13, 14, 22, 23, 31, 32, 33, 41, 42, 43, 51, 52, 53 and 55. The phantom 40 turns up in directory listings often enough that people go hunting for a station that does not exist, which is a miserable way to spend an evening when somebody you love is in custody.

The division matters because that is where the file physically lives in the early days. The officer in charge is there. The arresting officer notes are there. Anything seized is there, and the process of getting a phone or a vehicle back begins there rather than at a courthouse.

It also settles something we come back to further down this page, which is where in the courthouse your matter will be heard. Toronto groups its case management courtrooms by police division, and the three Scarborough divisions travel together. So the station named on your paperwork is not administrative trivia. It is the first fork in the road.

One note on geography. The western boundary of Scarborough is Victoria Park Avenue. An arrest a few streets west of that line belongs to a different division altogether, which matters when you are trying to find out who is holding someone or who to ask about an interview.

The officer in charge: released at the station, or held for a bail hearing?

The second decision-maker is the officer in charge at the division, and this is the person who decides whether you sleep in your own bed tonight.

After an arrest the officer in charge considers whether you can be released from the station on conditions, or whether you should be held for a bail hearing before a justice. The considerations are roughly what you would expect: how serious the allegation is, whether you have a record, whether there is a complainant who needs protecting, and whether there is any real reason to doubt you will come back to court. What surprises people is how fast this is decided, and how little the person deciding actually knows about you when they decide it.

That gap is where counsel earns their keep in the first few hours. A call from a lawyer at the right moment can supply what is missing. A fixed address. Employment. A family member willing to take responsibility in writing. A sensible set of conditions offered rather than resisted. It does not always work, and no honest lawyer will promise that it will. But the cost of not trying is a night in custody and a bail hearing that never needed to happen.

That last point deserves emphasis because we see it constantly. A no-contact condition means no contact, including through a friend, including a message sent with good intentions. In a criminal harassment or domestic matter, a single well-meant text can convert a defensible case into two charges instead of one.

The justice of the peace at the Finch Avenue bail centre

If you are held, the next person who matters is a justice of the peace, and you will meet them at the Toronto Region Bail Centre, 2201 Finch Avenue West.

Sit with that address for a second, because it catches Scarborough families out. Finch Avenue West is in the northwest of the city. From most of Scarborough that is a long drive right across the top of Toronto, and it is not the direction anybody expects to be driving. The Ontario Court of Justice established the centre to handle all adult bail operations for the region, along with weekend and statutory holiday bail court. The court record for that address lists its criminal case management court as not applicable. Bail is what happens there. Nothing else does.

There is a genuine upside to the arrangement. Because weekend and statutory holiday bail court runs out of the centre, a Friday night arrest in Scarborough does not mean sitting in a cell until Monday morning. A court sits.

The justice of the peace is deciding one question: whether you should be released and, if so, on what terms. They work from the Crown position, the plan put forward, and whatever your counsel can place in front of them. Legal Aid Ontario has duty counsel at the centre, and duty counsel do good work under real pressure, but they meet you that morning and they carry a full list. Where a contested bail hearing is coming, the preparation that determines the result happens before anyone walks into the room.

If you are a proposed surety, plan the trip the night before and leave early. Arriving late to a hearing you are the centrepiece of is a bad start that is entirely avoidable.

Your surety: what the court is really assessing when it looks at them

A surety is a person, usually a relative or a close friend, who undertakes to supervise you while the case runs and to make sure you attend court. They pledge an amount of money that can be forfeited if you do not comply. Most families assume the money is the point. It rarely is.

What the court is really assessing is the plan, and whether this particular person can actually run it.

• The relationship. How well do they know you, and do they have any genuine influence over your daily life?
• Whether supervision is practically possible. Someone working nights on the other side of the city cannot realistically supervise a person subject to a curfew, however willing they are.
• Their own history, including any criminal record, and whether they have acted as a surety before.
• Their finances, in the narrow sense of whether the pledged amount actually means something to them.
• Whether they understand the conditions they are undertaking to enforce, including enforcing them against somebody they love.

A weak plan is the most common reason an otherwise releasable person stays in custody. Not the allegation. The plan. And the difficulty is that families put forward whoever happens to be available rather than whoever is suitable, usually because nobody has explained the difference to them at eleven at night.

So we spend real time on this before a hearing. Identifying the right person, preparing them properly for questions they will answer under oath, and assembling a conditions package that the Crown finds harder to oppose than to accept.

The Crown at 10 Armoury Street, and what screening means for a Scarborough file

Once the case is in court, the most consequential person in it for a long stretch is the assigned Crown.

Before 2023 a Scarborough file was screened by the Crown office attached to the Scarborough courthouse at 1911 Eglinton Avenue East. That office was named for Scarborough and it carried the east end caseload. Toronto provincial Crown counsel now work out of 10 Armoury Street, and a Scarborough file is screened there alongside everything else in the city.

Screening is the Crown early assessment of the case. Whether there is a reasonable prospect of conviction. Whether a prosecution is in the public interest. What position to take on resolution. The answer recorded at that point has a long half life. It gets passed along, it gets relied on, and it becomes steadily harder to shift as the file ages and more people have signed off on it.

Which is why the most valuable work we do is usually the earliest. A properly organised position delivered before screening hardens, on a theft allegation resting on a shaky identification, or a mischief charge that grew out of a dispute between neighbours, can end a prosecution that would otherwise have run for a year and cost you far more than the outcome was ever worth.

Federal charges run on a separate track. Drug prosecutions under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act are conducted by the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, which also operates from Armoury Street for Toronto matters. Different institution, different counsel, different policies on resolution. Knowing which of them holds your file changes who we are speaking to on day one.

Courtroom 205: how east end Toronto cases are grouped and moved

The court is a decision-maker of a sort too, in that it decides where you go. And in Toronto it decides that by police division.

At 10 Armoury Street the adult case management courtrooms are assigned by division. Courtroom 205 is the east end room, and the court assigns it adult matters from Police Divisions 32, 41, 42 and 43. The three Scarborough divisions travel together into that single room. Youth case management runs separately in Courtroom 604, where the schedule sets Friday aside for east end matters.

There is a piece of history buried in that room number. The court own scheduling material records Courtroom 205 as having taken over a courtroom from 1911 Eglinton Avenue East. The east end list did not vanish in 2023. It was picked up and set down again downtown, with the same grouping logic and a new number on the door.

Practically, the room number tells you where to report on your first date, in a building large enough that guessing costs you a morning. It tells you which Crown team sees your file before anyone else, which is the team we approach. And it tells us exactly where to direct pressure when disclosure runs late, because a named room and a named team is a far better target than a complaint fired at a seventeen storey building.

It also explains something that unsettles people on their first attendance. The room is full of people whose allegations have nothing whatever in common with yours. They are there because the same divisions charged them. Grouping by division is an administrative convenience for the court, and knowing that takes some of the sting out of the morning.

The judge at the case management stage, and what a pre-trial actually resolves

Somewhere in the middle of the case a judge enters the picture, and not remotely in the way television has trained everyone to expect.

Long before any trial there is a Crown pre-trial, which is a discussion between your lawyer and the assigned Crown about the strength of the evidence, the Crown position, and what a realistic outcome looks like. Then comes a judicial pre-trial, where a judge joins that conversation. The judge is not deciding guilt and is not hearing evidence. They are giving both sides a candid read on how the case looks from the bench, what a resolution might attract, and whether the positions being taken are sensible or wishful.

A very large share of criminal cases are effectively decided in those rooms rather than at trial, and almost nobody outside the system knows the meetings exist. They are also where experience shows, plainly. A lawyer who appears in front of the same judges and the same Crowns week after week can read a pre-trial accurately and tell you what a given position is actually worth. That is not about personal favours. It is about knowing the going rate, and being able to explain to a client why an offer is good or why it is an insult.

Your job during this stretch is duller than you would like. Stay out of trouble. Comply with every condition to the letter. Stay contactable, and tell us immediately if your address or phone number changes. Cases are lost in the quiet months far more often than in the courtroom, usually through a breach or a missed date that nobody needed to have happen.

The election is yours, and it decides which court ends up hearing you

Here is a decision that belongs to you rather than to anyone in a uniform or a gown.

For offences classified as indictable, the Criminal Code gives an accused a choice about the mode of trial. You may elect trial in the Ontario Court of Justice before a provincial court judge, or you may elect the Superior Court of Justice, either by judge alone or by judge and jury. Some offences are carved out of that choice at one end or the other, and how the charge is classified governs whether the choice arises at all.

If you elect up, your matter leaves 10 Armoury Street. Superior Court criminal trials in Toronto are heard at 361 University Avenue, where the Criminal Trial Office sits on the fourth floor. That court was untouched by the 2023 consolidation, so it becomes a third address in a case that has already involved two.

The election is a genuine strategic decision rather than a formality. It affects timelines, whether a preliminary inquiry is available, the rhythm of disclosure, who decides the facts, and the procedural weight the case carries on both sides. On a firearms or weapons charge, or a serious assault allegation, that choice can reshape the entire defence. It gets made after we have read the disclosure and understand what the Crown actually has, and it is never a decision to take at a counter on a busy morning because somebody asked you a question you were not expecting.

The trial judge, the jury, and who decides what in a Scarborough case

If the case runs all the way to trial, the roles separate out in a way that is worth understanding in advance rather than discovering on the day.

In the Ontario Court of Justice a single judge decides both the law and the facts. They rule on what evidence is admissible, they assess the witnesses, and they deliver the verdict. In a Superior Court jury trial the work splits: the judge decides questions of law, including what the jury is permitted to hear, and the jury decides the facts and returns the verdict. In a Superior Court trial by judge alone, the judge does both jobs, but inside Superior Court procedure.

What does not change in any of those rooms is where the burden sits. The Crown has to prove every essential element of the offence beyond a reasonable doubt. You do not have to prove anything. You do not have to testify. And no adverse inference may be drawn from your silence at trial. That sounds abstract right up until you watch a prosecution come apart because the Crown could not close a gap the defence was never obliged to fill.

Most cases never reach this stage. But how a case would look at trial is precisely what drives every negotiation that happens before it, which is why we build files as though they are going to run even when we expect them to resolve. A Crown who can see that a matter is genuinely trial-ready assesses that matter differently, and that difference is worth more to you than any speech.

Whatever happened to the courthouse at 1911 Eglinton Avenue East?

Ask anybody who has lived in Scarborough for twenty years where the courthouse is, and you will get one answer. 1911 Eglinton Avenue East. It was the Toronto East courthouse. It had its own Crown office named for Scarborough. For a great many east end families it is the only courthouse they have ever walked into.

Here is what we can tell you, from the court own material. In 2023 the Ontario Court of Justice amalgamated six Toronto criminal courthouse locations into the Toronto Courthouse at 10 Armoury Street. 1911 Eglinton Avenue East was one of the six. Its criminal case management moved downtown, and the court scheduling documents record specific courtrooms making that move, including into Courtroom 205. The Ontario Court of Justice no longer lists 1911 Eglinton Avenue East among its locations. The Toronto entries on that list now number two: 10 Armoury Street, and the Regional Bail Centre.

Here is what we will not tell you. What is happening inside that building today. We do not know, and we are not going to guess on a page that people rely on for directions. Plenty of websites are happy to speculate about it. It makes no difference to your case either way, because the part that matters is settled. Scarborough criminal matters are heard at 10 Armoury Street.

And if you are holding a document that names Eglinton, that does not make it wrong about everything. Older paperwork can be perfectly accurate about a charge and thoroughly out of date about a building. Call before you drive anywhere, and we will tell you where your matter actually sits.

The decision only you can make: who represents you, and when you make that call

The last person in this sequence is you, and the decision is who acts for you and how early you make up your mind about it.

We do not have an office in Scarborough and we are not going to invent one. Kazandji Law works out of Toronto, Thornhill, North York and Oakville. Since every Scarborough criminal matter is now heard downtown at 10 Armoury Street, and bail runs through Finch Avenue West, a Scarborough storefront would not shorten a single trip for anyone. What shortens the process is counsel who has read your disclosure and knows the room your file sits in.

Timing matters far more than most people believe. The decisions that shape a case cluster at the very start. What you said at the roadside. What the officer in charge decided. What the release plan looked like when it was put together in a hurry. What the Crown wrote down the first time they screened the file. By the time somebody is unhappy enough to think about changing lawyers, several of those doors have already closed behind them.

Two practical notes before you call. If what you are holding is a Highway Traffic Act ticket or a city bylaw charge rather than a criminal charge, it belongs to a different system altogether. The City of Toronto runs the Toronto East Court Office at 1530 Markham Road, at the northwest corner of Markham Road and Milner Avenue, with courtrooms E1 through E10. Those courts deal with traffic and bylaw matters. They do not hear Criminal Code charges, and a criminal charge will never be resolved by paying something.

The second note is about who stopped you. If it happened on Highway 401 through Scarborough, the charge may have come from the Ontario Provincial Police rather than the Toronto Police Service, because the OPP polices the province highways while Toronto Police polices city streets. Highway 401 crosses Scarborough. Highway 404 and the Don Valley Parkway do not, whatever a directory listing tells you. Both stay west of Victoria Park Avenue, in North York and East York. Kingston Road formed part of Highway 2 until 1998, and Markham Road is the former Highway 48, locally maintained since 1963, so a stop on either of those is a Toronto Police matter rather than an OPP one.

Our criminal defence practice covers the charges that come out of 41, 42 and 43 Division, and you can read about results we have obtained for clients elsewhere on this site. For the wider provincial picture, start with our Ontario criminal defence overview. And because Scarborough and Etobicoke now share a courthouse and a bail centre, our Etobicoke criminal defence page covers the same two buildings from the west end of the city.

Why Kazandji Law, and what we bring to a Scarborough file

Kazandji Law is a criminal and family law firm serving Toronto and the surrounding regions. Fadi Matthew Kazandji, our founding partner, runs the practice on a simple principle. A client should understand what is happening in their own case, and nobody should be promised an outcome before a page of disclosure has been read.

We work out of four offices.

• Toronto, head office. 180 John Street, Unit 320, Toronto, Ontario M5T 1X5.
• Thornhill. 7191 Yonge Street, Suite 310, which also serves Markham and York Region.
• North York.
• Oakville.

Scarborough runs from the bluffs on the lake up to the northern edge of the city, and it is home to the University of Toronto Scarborough on Military Trail as well as several Centennial College campuses. Wherever in that area a charge was laid, the sequence set out on this page is the one it follows. What we bring to it is counsel standing in Courtroom 205 on the right morning, who has read the file and knows how the Crown at Armoury Street tends to handle a matter like yours. The first consultation is free, and there is no charge for finding out where you stand.

Twelve questions Scarborough clients ask

This page is general information about criminal procedure in Toronto and is not legal advice. Reading it does not create a solicitor and client relationship with Kazandji Law. Court locations, courtroom assignments and court practices change over time, and you should confirm the details that apply to your own matter before acting on anything set out here. If you have been charged, speak with a lawyer about your specific circumstances.