Oshawa Criminal Defence Lawyers

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Durham Region runs its criminal courts out of a single building. Everything, from the bail hearing on the morning after an arrest to a jury trial two years later, happens at 150 Bond Street East in Oshawa, officially the Lieutenant-Colonel Samuel S. Sharpe, DSO, MP Courthouse. So for an Oshawa charge the useful question is not where. It is when. This page walks a Durham case from the first hour to the last, in the order it actually happens.

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

Hour one: you've been arrested in Oshawa. What happens between now and morning?

An arrest in Oshawa usually starts on the street and ends in a cell at a Durham Regional Police division. Oshawa is Central East Division, at 77 Centre Street. If the arrest happened along the northern edge of the city, it may have been Central West Division at 480 Taunton Road East in Whitby instead, because that division polices Whitby along with the northern boundaries of Oshawa. Durham Regional Police describes Oshawa as its busiest jurisdiction, and the divisions reflect that.

What happens in the next several hours is mostly procedural, and mostly out of your hands. Booking. A search. Property taken and logged. A phone call. And then one decision that matters more than anything else that night: whether the officer in charge releases you on an undertaking with conditions, or holds you for a bail hearing in the morning.

The single most valuable thing you can do in hour one is say very little. You have the right to speak to a lawyer, and you have the right to remain silent, and those two rights are not decorative. Police are permitted to keep asking questions after you say you do not want to talk. Officers are allowed to be friendly. None of that changes the fact that the interview is evidence and your explanation is not being recorded so that it can help you.

Two other things worth knowing before morning. Property seized at the time of arrest generally stays with the investigating division rather than going to the courthouse, so that is where a recovery conversation starts. And if there is any allegation of a domestic nature, expect release conditions that keep the accused away from a home and sometimes away from children, imposed before anyone has heard a word from the defence.

The morning after: how a Durham bail hearing runs at 150 Bond Street East

Bail in Durham happens where everything else in Durham happens. There is no separate bail centre to find, no second building, no drive to another municipality. Ontario Court of Justice bail hearings for Oshawa arrests are held at 150 Bond Street East, and the Superior Court of Justice at the same address deals with bail hearings and reviews and with ninety day detention review hearings.

Legal Aid Ontario runs Oshawa Criminal Duty Counsel out of the same building. Duty counsel can assist at a bail hearing and can give summary advice, and for someone with no lawyer at eight in the morning that is genuinely valuable. It is not the same thing as counsel who has spoken to your family, vetted a surety, and arrived with a written release plan.

What actually happens in the room is less dramatic than television suggests. The Crown reads a synopsis of the allegation and states a position. If the Crown is opposing release, the argument runs on three grounds: whether you will attend court, whether you present a substantial likelihood of reoffending or interfering with the administration of justice, and whether releasing you would shake public confidence in the justice system. Defence answers those grounds with a plan, not with a speech about innocence. Guilt is not the question at a bail hearing.

On certain charges the burden flips. In a reverse-onus situation it is the accused who must show why release is justified rather than the Crown showing why detention is. That changes the preparation completely and it is one of the clearest cases for getting counsel involved before the hearing rather than after.

Weekend and statutory holiday bail courts operate across Ontario, so an arrest on a Saturday does not mean sitting until Monday. Whatever the day, the conditions imposed at that first hearing tend to govern the following year of a person's life: where they live, who they can speak to, whether they can go home. They can be varied later, but varying them takes time and a reason.

The one building that does everything in Durham, and why that's unusual

Durham is unusual and most people who live here have no idea. Infrastructure Ontario describes the Durham Region Courthouse as providing Superior and Ontario Courts justice services under one roof, consolidating what previously operated from eight different locations, with thirty three courtrooms in the building.

The name confusion is worth clearing up, because both names are in official use. Infrastructure Ontario calls it the Durham Region Courthouse. The Ministry of the Attorney General and the Ontario Court of Justice call it the Lieutenant-Colonel Samuel S. Sharpe, DSO, MP Courthouse. Same building, 150 Bond Street East, Oshawa, L1G 0A2. If you say either one to court staff you will be understood.

What sits inside it: adult criminal and youth criminal in the Ontario Court of Justice, and civil, criminal, family, small claims and Divisional Court in the Superior Court of Justice. The Crown Attorney's office for Durham is in the building too, with no separate street address published, because there is nowhere else for it to be.

Oshawa is also the only Ontario Court of Justice location in Durham Region. Within the court's administrative structure, Durham belongs to the Central East Region, grouped with Barrie, Bracebridge, Bradford, Cobourg, Lindsay, Newmarket, Orillia and Peterborough. So a charge laid in Whitby, Ajax, Pickering, Clarington, Uxbridge, Brock or Scugog comes to Bond Street in Oshawa just as an Oshawa charge does.

For you that means something genuinely useful. One address for the life of the file. One Crown office to deal with. One set of directions, one parking problem to solve once, one security line to learn. Compare that with regions where bail runs out of one building, trials out of another and the higher court out of a third, and the Durham arrangement starts to look like a small mercy.

It also means volume. Thirty three courtrooms in one place is a busy building, and busy buildings run on lists. Being in the right room at the right time is not a trivial skill.

Your first appearance, and why almost nothing happens at it

People prepare for their first appearance as though it were the trial. It is not. It is the least eventful morning of the entire case.

A first appearance in the Ontario Court of Justice is administrative. The court confirms you are present, confirms whether you have counsel or need time to retain counsel, and sets another date so disclosure can be requested and reviewed. Nobody argues the case. Nobody should be pleading. At this point in the file the defence has not seen the evidence, so any decision made that morning is a decision made blind.

On most Ontario Court of Justice matters counsel can appear on your behalf for routine remands and set dates. That means you are not spending a vacation day in Oshawa for a two minute appearance. Some dates do require you personally, and a trial certainly does. What you want is to be told clearly, in advance, which is which.

The mistake that recurs at this stage is pleading early to make the anxiety stop. It is completely understandable and it is almost always premature. On a summary matter with a defence worth running, an early plea can close off a conditional discharge, a diversion program or an outright withdrawal that would have been available four months later. The second mistake is treating release conditions as paperwork. They are enforceable the moment they are signed, and a breach is a fresh charge that is often harder to defend than the one you started with. That holds whether the underlying allegation is an assault or something far more serious.

What matters in the weeks after the first appearance is not courtroom performance. It is paperwork: getting disclosure, reading every page, working out what is missing, and asking for the missing material in writing so there is a record of the asking.

Disclosure: what the Oshawa Crown has to give you, and when

Disclosure is the Crown's obligation to hand over the fruits of the investigation, and it is the hinge the whole case turns on. Not just the material the Crown intends to rely on. The relevant material, including what is unhelpful to the prosecution.

In a Durham file the first package typically arrives in the weeks after the first appearance. Expect the synopsis, officer notes, witness statements, the criminal record if there is one, and whatever video exists. What arrives first is rarely everything.

• Video. In car camera, booking area footage, body worn camera where it was in use, and any third party recordings police obtained.
• Communications. Radio transmissions, dispatch records and the call that started the investigation.
• Notes from every officer. Not just the arresting officer. Secondary officers frequently record details that contradict the narrative.
• Technical material. Calibration and maintenance records where an instrument was used, and continuity records for anything seized and tested.
• Third party records. Sometimes held by an agency rather than the Crown, which means a separate application rather than a request.

The gap between the first package and the complete package is where a lot of quiet work happens. Requests go in writing. Follow ups go in writing. If the material still does not come, the remedy is an application to the court, and the record of asking is what makes that application work.

There is a timing dimension too. A case has a ceiling, and delay that is not attributable to the defence counts against the Crown. Waiting passively for outstanding disclosure is not the same as chasing it and documenting the chase. The first approach loses you time. The second occasionally wins you the case.

Read all of it. Clients routinely find the thing that matters, because they were there and counsel was not. A date that does not line up, a person described as present who was not, a sequence that could not have happened in the order written.

Crown pre-trial and judicial pre-trial: where most Durham cases are really decided

Here is the part nobody outside the system understands. Most Durham criminal cases are not decided at trial. They are decided in two meetings that the public never sees.

A Crown pre-trial is a discussion between your lawyer and the assigned Crown about the strength of the case, the Crown's position on resolution and what a realistic outcome looks like. It is where the Crown hears the problems with its own file, ideally in a way that does not require a judge to point them out later. A judicial pre-trial brings a judge into that conversation. The judge gives a view, usually candidly, about how the case looks and what a reasonable landing point would be.

These are not formalities and they are not the same as plea bargaining in the American sense. There is no bargaining over the charge with a prosecutor who has discretion to invent an outcome. What happens is narrower and more useful: positions get tested, weak points get named, and a case that was heading for three trial days sometimes resolves on terms nobody would have proposed on day one.

What makes a pre-trial go well is preparation that has nothing to do with oratory. Counselling already under way rather than promised. Restitution already paid rather than offered. Medical records, employment letters, an immigration issue flagged before the Crown proposes something that would trigger it. A Charter issue identified with the specific page of disclosure that supports it.

Resolution is not always the goal. Some files should go to trial, and a Crown that will not move on an unwinnable position should be made to prove it. But that decision should be made after the pre-trials, with information, rather than assumed at the start.

Months three to nine: the quiet stretch, and the mistakes people make in it

Between the pre-trials and the trial date there is a long stretch where nothing visibly happens. Months. It is the hardest part of the process for most people, because the anxiety does not pause just because the file does.

Things do happen during it. Outstanding disclosure arrives. Expert reports are commissioned where they are needed. Applications get drafted. Witness availability gets sorted. But from the outside it looks like silence, and silence is where people make the mistakes that cost them the case.

The mistakes are predictable. Drifting on a condition because months have passed and nothing bad happened. Contacting someone you were told not to contact, through a third party, which counts. Missing a reporting date. Picking up a new charge, which does more damage to the first file than most people expect, because it converts a person with no record into a person with a pattern. Even a minor theft allegation landing mid-file changes the conversation entirely.

The other mistake is going quiet with your own lawyer. Circumstances change over a year. A new job, a move, a pregnancy, a treatment program completed, an immigration application filed. All of it is relevant to the outcome and none of it helps if counsel learns about it the week of sentencing.

When a Durham case elects up to the Superior Court of Justice

At some point on a serious charge the word election appears, and the room assumes you know what it means.

Most criminal matters begin and end in the Ontario Court of Justice. Summary conviction offences stay there. So do plenty of indictable matters, because the accused elects trial by a provincial court judge and that is often the right call. Where the charge is indictable, though, there may be a right to elect trial by a judge of the Superior Court of Justice sitting alone, or by a judge and jury.

In Durham that election does not move you to another city. The Superior Court sits in the same Bond Street building, and its criminal work there includes trials, judicial pre-trials, bail hearings and reviews, detention review hearings and summary conviction appeals. The address is identical. Almost nothing else is.

• Preliminary inquiry. Available on a narrower band of charges than it once was, and a strategic question rather than an automatic entitlement.
• Timelines. A longer presumptive ceiling, which changes both delay arguments and how long you live under your conditions.
• Formality. Notice requirements, pre-trial applications and the conduct of the trial itself are more demanding.
• Juries. Twelve people from Durham Region rather than one judge, which is sometimes an advantage and sometimes precisely the opposite.

Whether a jury helps depends on the allegation. Some cases play better to a room of ordinary people than to a judge who has heard the same defence many times. Others, particularly emotionally charged allegations such as sexual offences, or document heavy fraud cases that require patience with detail, can cut the other way entirely.

The election is made once and it is not freely reversible. Re-election is possible within defined limits and sometimes only with consent. Make it deliberately, with the disclosure read, not at a counter and not on a hallway recommendation.

Trial in Oshawa: what the room looks like and what your day is like

If the case does not resolve, you get a trial date, and eventually the date arrives. Here is what the day is actually like, because almost nobody tells people and the not knowing makes it worse.

The room is smaller and quieter than you expect. There is no gallery full of spectators. In a judge alone trial there is a judge, a clerk, a court reporter, the Crown, your counsel, you, and whichever witness is currently testifying. In a jury trial add twelve jurors and a good deal more waiting, because juries are sent out whenever the lawyers need to argue about what they are allowed to hear.

The Crown goes first and calls its witnesses. Each one is examined by the Crown and then cross examined by your lawyer. Cross examination is not the television version. It is slow, specific and built out of the disclosure you read months earlier: the note that says one thing and the statement that says another, the timing that does not work, the detail that has grown between the first account and this one. Then the defence may or may not call evidence, and there is no obligation to. Then submissions. Then a decision, sometimes that day and sometimes reserved.

Whether you testify is one of the hardest decisions in the case and it belongs to you, on advice. There is no obligation on an accused person to prove anything. Sometimes testifying is essential, in a break and enter case turning on lawful presence, for instance, or where consent or self defence is genuinely in issue. Sometimes it converts a case the Crown had not proven into one it has.

Practical points for the day. Arrive early enough for the security line. Dress as though you respect the room, because the room notices. Expect to wait, and expect the schedule to move. Trials get adjourned for reasons that have nothing to do with you, and it is maddening and it is normal.

Sentencing, records, and the things that follow you out of Bond Street

If there is a conviction, or a guilty plea, the case moves to sentencing, and this is where the difference between good preparation and no preparation shows most plainly.

Ontario courts work from a range shaped by the offence, the circumstances, the degree of harm, the offender's record, and the principles of sentencing in the Criminal Code. Within that range there is real room, and what fills it is material. A person who arrives with completed counselling, letters from an employer, proof of restitution and a clear account of what they have changed is in a different position from a person who arrives with an apology. Not because the second is insincere, but because the first is evidence.

The outcomes are not simply jail or nothing. Depending on the charge there may be an absolute or conditional discharge, which avoids a conviction, a suspended sentence with probation, a fine, a conditional sentence in the narrow cases where one is still available, or a custodial term. There are also ancillary orders that people forget to ask about until they are bound by them: weapons prohibitions, DNA orders, driving prohibitions, registry obligations on certain offences.

Then there is the part that outlasts the sentence. A conviction appears on police record checks, and a vulnerable sector check goes further again. It reaches into licensing for regulated professions, into bonding for the trades, into volunteer work at schools and hospitals, into immigration status and applications for permanent residence or citizenship, and into travel, particularly to the United States, where another country decides admissibility under its own rules.

Clearing it later is slow. A record suspension carries waiting periods that run from the completion of the whole sentence, fines and probation included, and it sets a record aside rather than erasing it. Our record suspension lawyers can walk through the timelines. The honest summary is that avoiding the conviction is worth a great deal more than tidying up afterwards.

Your ticket isn't a criminal charge, and it isn't even in Oshawa

This is the one section that breaks the chronology, because it belongs to a different process altogether, and because getting it wrong wastes a day.

Provincial offences in Durham Region are not dealt with at 150 Bond Street East. They are administered by the Regional Municipality of Durham, and the court office is at Regional Headquarters, lower level, 605 Rossland Road East in Whitby, open Monday to Friday from 8:00 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon. That is where a Highway Traffic Act ticket goes. Speeding, careless driving, the licence and permit offences, and the other provincial statutes.

The confusion runs both directions and the second direction is more dangerous. People assume a driving matter is minor because most driving matters are. But some driving offences are Criminal Code offences, not provincial ones. Impaired driving, driving over the legal limit, refusing a breath sample, dangerous driving and failing to remain are criminal charges. They come with a criminal record on conviction, and they are heard in Oshawa on Bond Street, not in Whitby. If you have been charged with dangerous driving you are not dealing with a ticket.

One more wrinkle worth naming. Durham Regional Police handles municipal roads. The Ontario Provincial Police polices Ontario's provincial highways, and its Highway Safety Division has a detachment on Highway 401 in Whitby. So a charge laid on a highway through Durham may be an OPP file even though the courthouse is the same. The organisation behind the disclosure changes, and with it the notes, the video systems and the officers you would be cross examining.

If you cannot tell from the paperwork which kind of charge you have, that is a short phone call and not something to resolve by guessing at a counter.

Students at Durham College and Ontario Tech: the consequences nobody warns you about

Durham College and Ontario Tech University share a campus address at 2000 Simcoe Street North in north Oshawa. Between them they put a large student population into the city, and a student charged with an offence is carrying risks that the court process itself will never mention.

The criminal case is only part of the problem. Depending on the charge and the person's status, a conviction can affect immigration standing for an international student, eligibility for placements, admission to professional programs, and licensing further down the line. Programs in nursing, paramedicine, education, early childhood work, policing and social services routinely require a criminal record check or a vulnerable sector check before a placement. A charge that resolves in a way that leaves no record is a different life from one that does not.

There is usually a parallel process too. Universities and colleges run their own conduct procedures, and those procedures do not wait for the criminal court and are not bound by its outcome. What a student says to an institutional investigator can find its way into the criminal matter. That is a genuine trap, and it is why anyone facing both should get advice before answering anything in either forum.

None of this means a student charge is hopeless. It means the strategy has to account for consequences that sit outside the courtroom from the first week, because a resolution that looks generous on paper can be the wrong one if it produces a record the person cannot carry. Those conversations belong at the start of the file, not at sentencing.

Why Kazandji Law

Kazandji Law is a Toronto criminal defence firm with four offices across the Greater Toronto Area. None of them is in Oshawa. We appear at 150 Bond Street East for Durham matters, and we would rather say that plainly than imply an address we do not have.

• Toronto, head office. 180 John Street, Unit 320, Toronto, Ontario M5T 1X5.
• Thornhill. 7191 Yonge Street, Suite 310, serving our Markham and York Region clients.
• North York. For clients in the north end of the city.
• Oakville. Serving Halton and the western end of the GTA.

Fadi Matthew Kazandji is the founding partner. The firm is built around criminal defence, with a family law practice alongside it. The criminal work runs across bail, driving offences, assault and domestic matters, drugs, weapons, fraud and property offences, sexual offences, youth matters and appeals. If you want the wider view of how we run files, start with our criminal defence practice.

For a Durham charge the argument for a local storefront is weaker than it looks. Everything in the region happens in one building, and what changes an outcome there is counsel who has read the disclosure line by line, knows how the Crown office in that building screens files, and is in the right courtroom on the right morning. You can see a selection of case results on our site. We do not publish guarantees, and you should be wary of anyone who does.

Oshawa criminal charges: twelve questions we get asked

This page is general information about criminal procedure in Durham Region and it is not legal advice. Reading it does not create a solicitor and client relationship with Kazandji Law. Court locations, office hours and contact details change, so confirm anything time sensitive with the court before you rely on it. If you have been charged, speak with a lawyer about your own circumstances.