Kingston Criminal Defence Lawyers

Home › Criminal Defence › Kingston Criminal Defence Lawyers

Criminal charges in Kingston are heard at the Kingston Courthouse, 279 Wellington Street. Two other court buildings sit elsewhere in the city, one of them carries almost the same name, and a fourth address deals with tickets. But your case does not begin in a courtroom. It begins with a list of conditions you are now living under, and those conditions will shape more of the next several months than any hearing will. This page works through them one at a time, and it treats our own distance from Kingston as one more constraint to plan around rather than something to talk past.

Written by the criminal defence team at Kazandji Law, led by founding partner Fadi Matthew Kazandji. Court details were checked against the Ontario Court of Justice Kingston location page, the Superior Court of Justice Kingston page, the Ministry of the Attorney General court locations listings and the City of Kingston.

The first thing that changes: the conditions you are now living under

Whatever happens to your charge eventually, something has already happened to your life. You were handed a document, and it now governs where you sleep, who you speak to, what you can drink and where you can go. Most people read it once in a hallway, put it in a pocket, and do not look at it again until an officer is at the door.

Take it out today and go through it line by line. Every line is enforceable on its own terms, and none of them care what you thought it meant.

The starting point in Canadian law is release on the least onerous terms that are appropriate. Conditions are supposed to attach to a specific risk: that you will not return to court, that you will interfere with a witness, or that public safety needs protecting. They are not meant to be punishment, and a condition with no link to any of those risks is worth challenging rather than enduring. That argument is far easier to make early than eighteen months into a file. How release actually gets decided is set out on our Ontario bail hearings page.

Where those conditions are enforced and varied: Kingston’s four court addresses, and which one is yours

Kingston has the most confusing set of court addresses in eastern Ontario. Two separate buildings are officially named Kingston Courthouse and only one hears criminal charges. A third is the Superior Court. A fourth deals with tickets and sits on the same street as one of the others.

Address	Official name	What happens there
279 Wellington St.	Kingston Courthouse	Ontario Court of Justice criminal and criminal youth matters, the Crown Attorney’s Office, Victim and Witness Assistance. This is the criminal court
5 Court St.	Kingston (Frontenac County) Courthouse	Superior Court of Justice, including criminal trials on indictable matters, bail reviews and detention reviews
469 Montreal St.	Kingston Courthouse	Family matters and Victim and Witness Assistance. No criminal work at all
362 Montreal St.	Provincial Offences Court	Run by the City of Kingston for Provincial Offences Act charges and by-laws. No Criminal Code charge is heard here

The Ministry’s name for the Superior Court building is the most useful thing here for finding your way. Kingston (Frontenac County) Courthouse is 5 Court Street. Plain Kingston Courthouse is either 279 Wellington or 469 Montreal, and which one depends on whether your matter is criminal or family. If someone tells you to go to the Kingston Courthouse without a street number, they have told you nothing.

The Montreal Street pair catches people most often. 362 is tickets. 469 is family. Neither is criminal. If your Offence Notice sends you to 362 Montreal Street, you are not facing a criminal charge, and the City gives you fifteen days from the date on the Notice to choose between paying it, asking for an early resolution meeting with a prosecutor, or asking for a trial. That process and its consequences are different in kind from anything at 279 Wellington.

Two further points of practical geography. The Superior Court in Kingston splits its criminal scheduling across two inboxes, with trials and assignment court coordinated separately from judicial pre-trials, bail hearings, detention reviews, applications and appeals. Counsel who does not know that emails the wrong desk and loses a week. And a charge laid outside the city may be returnable somewhere else entirely: the Ministry lists court locations in Napanee at 41 Dundas Street West and 97 Thomas Street East. Read the address on your own document rather than assuming the nearest city is right.

Court offices at 279 Wellington run Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with counter service in two windows. French language services are available there by phone and at the counter.

“No contact”: how far that condition really reaches

This is the condition breached most often, and almost never on purpose. A no contact condition names a person and prohibits communication with them, directly or indirectly. The word indirectly does enormous work in that sentence, and it is the word nobody explains.

Indirect contact includes asking your brother to pass on a message, or a mutual friend mentioning you were asking after them. It includes liking a photograph, replying to a story, being added to a group chat that person is in, or messaging from a different account. It includes arriving at a party you were both invited to. Courts have treated all of these as contact, because what matters is the effect on the named person, not the route the message took.

Where the condition also prohibits attending an address, treat it as an exclusion zone rather than a rule about entering a building. Standing outside is attending. If that address sits near your work, your gym or your child’s school, raise the collision now rather than explaining it later.

Kingston runs its Wednesday adult case management list as a domestic list, which tells you something about how much of the local criminal docket involves people who know each other. Where an allegation arises between partners or family members, the no contact condition is usually the most consequential thing in the file, and the exposure from getting it wrong is set out on our page about domestic misconduct while on bail. Repeated attempts to reach someone who does not want to be reached can also found a separate charge, which is the territory covered by criminal harassment.

If there are children and a family order about access, the two documents can point in opposite directions. No officer at the door will arbitrate that. It gets fixed by varying the criminal condition to carve out contact permitted by a family order, and that has to be asked for.

Where you have to live, and what happens when that address stops working

A residence condition requires you to live at a named address. Not to receive mail there, not to keep belongings there. To sleep there. Some orders go further and require you to be present at that address except for specified purposes, which is house arrest by another name.

Addresses are unstable exactly when a criminal charge lands. A lease ends. A landlord asks you to leave. A relationship that was housing you ends because of the very allegation before the court. A surety decides they can no longer supervise. Each is ordinary life, and each puts you in breach of a court order by Friday if nothing is done.

The rule is simple and people still get it wrong. You cannot move first and tell the court afterwards. Changing the address requires the condition to be varied, on consent through the Crown or by application, and that takes days. So the moment housing becomes unstable is the moment to raise it, not the day the keys go back. Someone sleeping on a friend’s couch because their address fell through is committing an offence every night, and is usually the last to realise it.

Curfew and house arrest conditions: how they are actually checked

A curfew requires you to be inside a named address between set hours. House arrest requires you there at all times except for listed exceptions, usually employment, medical appointments, counselling and court attendance. The difference is enormous in practice and the wording is easy to misread.

Compliance is checked the obvious way. An officer attends during curfew hours and expects you at the door. Not a housemate. Not a message through a window. You, in person, within a reasonable time. Kingston Police are the service of jurisdiction inside the city, and a curfew check at eleven at night is ordinary work rather than something personal.

This produces breaches that have nothing to do with the allegation. Someone is asleep with headphones in. Someone has stepped out to the car for two minutes. Someone works a shift running past curfew and assumed the employment exception covered the journey home. The answers are unglamorous: keep a phone audible overnight, tell anyone you live with what to do if police attend, and get any exception you rely on written into the order.

Read the exceptions carefully. Employment usually means work with a schedule that can be evidenced, not the possibility of picking some up. A medical emergency exception covers emergencies, not routine appointments. Where your genuine life does not fit the condition, the condition needs varying.

Abstain conditions: alcohol, drugs, and what compliance looks like

An abstain condition prohibits possessing or consuming alcohol, controlled substances, or both. It is common where the allegation involved intoxication, and it is broader than people assume.

A prohibition on possessing alcohol is not limited to drinking it. It can be breached by a bottle in a cupboard belonging to someone else in the house. If you live with people who drink, address that when the condition is drafted rather than during a curfew check.

On controlled substances the standard wording carves out drugs prescribed to you by a physician. Note both words: prescribed, and to you. Medication prescribed to a partner does not qualify. With cannabis, legality is irrelevant. A condition prohibiting cannabis is enforceable whether or not the substance is lawfully available, and many people have breached one on exactly that misunderstanding. Where the charge itself is a drug offence, expect the abstain condition to be drafted tightly and enforced closely.

If you have a genuine dependency, say so early and say it to your lawyer. An abstain condition imposed on someone in active withdrawal is a breach waiting to happen, and courts respond far better to a treatment proposal than to an explanation after a failure.

Weapons conditions: what has to be surrendered, and when

A weapons condition prohibits possessing firearms, ammunition, crossbows, prohibited and restricted weapons and explosive substances, and usually requires you to surrender anything you have along with any licence or registration certificate. The surrender is not something to get around to. It is a term of the order, with a deadline in it.

The Criminal Code definition of weapon is wider than the ordinary meaning. Anything used, designed or intended for use in causing death or injury, or for threatening, can qualify, so a broadly drafted condition can reach a knife carried for work or a replica. If your occupation or hobby involves something that might be caught, have that conversation before an officer has it for you.

Surrender goes to the police service, and you want a record of it. Take the receipt and keep it. Someone who surrendered properly but cannot prove it is in a materially worse position, and firearms held at a police facility do not come back automatically at the end of the case. Our page on weapons offences sets out how these charges and orders work more broadly.

Be aware of what sits behind this condition. On conviction for a range of offences the Criminal Code requires a court to consider or impose a weapons prohibition that outlasts the sentence, sometimes for life. The release condition is temporary. The order that can follow a conviction is not, and that deserves attention at the start of a case rather than at sentencing.

Reporting, and what your surety actually signed up to

A reporting condition requires you to attend a named place at named intervals. It is simple and it is breached constantly, because people treat it as a formality. Missing a date because of a shift change, illness or a car that would not start is still a breach. Where something genuinely prevents attendance, contact someone before the window closes.

The surety is the part that deserves far more explanation than it gets, because sureties are rarely told what they are agreeing to in terms they can act on. A surety is not a character reference. It is a person who pledges money to the court as a guarantee that you will attend and obey your conditions, and who takes on a real supervisory obligation.

In practice the surety is expected to know where you are, to know what your conditions say, and to bring you back to court or contact police if you breach. The pledged money is usually not deposited, which is why people underestimate it. If you breach and the Crown applies to estreat, the surety can be called before a judge to explain why they should not pay. People have lost real money this way.

A surety who can no longer supervise is not trapped. They can apply to be relieved, which usually means the accused is taken into custody until a new plan is approved. Hard, but far better than a surety quietly stepping back and finding themselves before a judge months later. If the arrangement is failing, say so early.

Travel: leaving Kingston, leaving Ontario, leaving the country

Travel restrictions arrive in several forms and people misread which one they have. A condition to remain within a defined area is the tightest. A condition requiring notice before travel is looser but still binding. Surrender of a passport removes international travel whatever else the order says. And a release order with no travel term still carries an obligation to attend court, so travel colliding with a court date is a problem even where nothing prohibits it.

Kingston sits on Highway 401 with Highway 15 and Highway 2 serving the city, and many people here work, study or have family across a boundary. If that is your life, raise it while conditions are being drafted. A geographic condition negotiated at the outset to fit a real commute is straightforward. The same request after a breach is not.

International travel deserves separate thought. Admission to any other country is decided by that country under its own law, not by a Canadian court, and an outstanding charge or a record can affect it. We will not tell you what a foreign border officer will do, because nobody can. What we will say is that the question belongs before a plea is entered rather than after, because a criminal record can reach travel, employment screening and, for anyone who is not a Canadian citizen, immigration status. That last category is set out on our page about the immigration consequences of a criminal conviction, and it is the thing clients most often wish they had asked about earlier.

One more constraint to plan around: your lawyer is in Toronto, and there are closer firms in Ottawa

You have spent this page reading about constraints you did not choose. Here is one you do choose, and we will be blunt about it.

So what does distance cost you, and what does it not? Start with what it does not. A lawyer licensed by the Law Society of Ontario holds a licence covering the whole province. There is no local call, no local admission and no courthouse registration for Kingston. A Toronto lawyer appears at 279 Wellington Street on the same footing as a lawyer whose office is on Princess Street. Entitlement was never the issue anywhere in Ontario.

What distance does affect is attendance, and that is governed by law rather than by what any firm promises. Criminal Code section 715.21 says a person who appears at, participates in or presides at a proceeding shall do so in person, except as otherwise provided in the Act. Remote attendance is the exception.

Two distinct provisions then apply, and firms blur them constantly. Section 715.23 governs the accused appearing by audioconference or videoconference, and requires the court to be satisfied it is appropriate having regard to all the circumstances, including your location and personal circumstances, the cost of attending in person, the suitability of the place you would appear from, your right to a fair and public hearing, and the nature and seriousness of the offence. Defence counsel is covered by a different provision. Section 715.25 defines a participant as a person other than an accused, an offender, a witness, a juror, a judge or a justice, and counsel falls inside that definition. Under section 715.25 the court may allow a participant to attend remotely on a similar list of considerations, and the party putting a participant on video normally bears the technology cost. A firm that cites 715.23 to explain how its lawyer attends by video has cited the wrong section.

The stage specific rules sit at sections 715.231 through 715.241, attaching different consent requirements to preliminary inquiries, trials, pleas and sentencings. Two safeguards run throughout. A court refusing a remote request under this Part must give reasons on the record under section 715.221, and under section 715.222 a court may end a remote appearance at any point. Remote attendance is permissive and judicially controlled throughout.

Layered on top is the practice direction in force in the Ontario Court of Justice, Mode of Appearance for Ontario Court of Justice Criminal Proceedings, issued by Chief Justice Nicklas under rules 1.4 and 5 of the Criminal Rules and carrying a last updated date of 31 March 2025 on the Court’s page. It is specific about which stages bend.

Stage	How it actually runs
First appearance after arrest and contested bail	The accused appears by video unless the Court directs otherwise
Case management, including JICMC and trial confirmation	Out of custody accused and counsel may attend virtually or in person unless a judicial officer directs otherwise. Counsel attending virtually are expected on video, not audio
Judicial pre-trial	Conducted by video unless otherwise directed
Guilty plea and sentencing	All participants in person unless the Court allows a virtual plea, which has to be applied for
Trial and preliminary inquiry	All participants in person unless a judge orders otherwise, normally on a written application

One sentence in that direction matters more than the rest for anyone weighing an out of town firm. Because private consultation is difficult across mixed modes, Crown and defence counsel are expected to attend all criminal proceedings other than case management appearances in person if the accused is appearing in person, unless a judicial officer directs otherwise. In plain terms: when you are in the room at 279 Wellington Street, your lawyer is in the room. Anyone offering you a fully remote defence has either misread that or is hoping you will not check.

Kingston has its own local shape. The Court publishes adult case management sittings in Courtroom 2 on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and in Courtroom 4 on Tuesdays for counsel matters, with the Wednesday adult list running as a domestic list and morning tiers beginning at nine. The Judge-led Intensive Case Management Court sits in Courtroom 3 every other Tuesday at nine, plea court sits Thursdays, and no trial readiness court is published for Kingston at all.

So here is the honest arithmetic. For case management and judicial pre-trials, our being in Toronto costs you close to nothing, because those stages are remote by design. For bail, contested motions, trial and sentencing we drive to Kingston, and that cost is ours. What distance genuinely limits is the incidental: catching a Crown in a hallway about an unrelated file, or attending on four hours notice. Weigh those.

Ask us, and ask any Ottawa firm, the identical question: who is actually standing up on my dates, and what happens when two of them collide with somebody else’s trial? That answer tells you more than the distance on a map. We give the same answer in Ottawa and in London.

Changing a condition, and breaching one: the two roads out, and why the second is so much harder

Conditions are not permanent fixtures. They can be varied, and that road is straightforward when taken early. Where the Crown consents, a release order can be varied without a contested hearing. Where it does not, an application can be brought and the court asked to remove or reshape a condition not justified by a real risk.

What makes that road easy or hard is timing and record. Someone who has complied for months, has a stable address and needs a condition varied for a job is in a strong position. Someone asking a fortnight after a breach allegation is asking the same court to trust an undertaking that has just failed.

The second road is the one nobody wants. Breaching a condition is a separate criminal offence, prosecuted separately, and it does damage out of all proportion to its seriousness. It hands the Crown an argument at any future bail hearing, it can see your release revoked, it can be used at sentencing on the original matter, and it can put your surety in the position of paying what they pledged. A single missed curfew check can do all of that. How these allegations are met is set out on our page about failure to comply charges.

Two things matter if you are told you have breached. The Crown still has to prove it, and where the failure was genuinely beyond your control that counts. And say nothing about it to police. An explanation offered at the door, however reasonable it sounds in your head, becomes evidence of the very act that needs proving.

When the conditions end, and what replaces them

Release conditions end when the case ends. What people do not always appreciate is that something usually takes their place, and the replacement can last considerably longer.

If the charge is withdrawn or you are acquitted, the conditions fall away, although a record of the charge can persist in police databases and surface in a vulnerable sector check. A discharge, conditional or absolute, is not a conviction, but a conditional discharge carries probation with its own conditions, and both types stay visible on a record check for a set period. On a conviction the sentence may include probation, which works much like the conditions you have been living under, except that breaching it is its own offence.

Ancillary orders outlast much of this. A weapons prohibition can run for years or for life. A DNA order is permanent. Sex offence registration carries reporting obligations for a very long period. None of these is the sentence people describe to their family afterwards, and all of them are part of what is actually being agreed when a plea is discussed.

There is also a route that ends without a conviction. A peace bond under section 810 of the Criminal Code is an order to keep the peace and be of good behaviour on conditions, entered without a finding of guilt, and in the right case it resolves a matter while still giving a complainant the protection the conditions aimed at. It is not always appropriate, but it is worth understanding, and our page on section 810 recognizances explains how they work.

Why Kazandji Law

We are a criminal defence firm, and when a client is charged in Kingston we act on the terms set out above. No office in the city, no pretence of one, and a plain account of what our distance does and does not affect.

Our offices are at 180 John Street Unit 320 in Toronto, 7191 Yonge Street Suite 310 in Thornhill, and in North York and Oakville. Founding partner Fadi Matthew Kazandji leads the defence practice, and the lawyer you speak to about your file is the lawyer who carries it. We travel for the stages that require presence and we appear remotely where the Court permits it.

What we offer is not proximity. It is preparation: disclosure chased in writing from the first week, Crown pre-trials built from the evidence, conditions challenged early rather than endured, and honest advice about what a resolution costs you including the parts that outlast the sentence. If your matter needs something we cannot give it, we will tell you before you retain us.

Kingston criminal defence: twelve questions answered

This page is general information about criminal procedure in Kingston, Ontario and is not legal advice. Court schedules, courtroom assignments and contact details change; confirm anything time sensitive with the Ontario Court of Justice or the courthouse before relying on it. Reading this page does not create a solicitor and client relationship with Kazandji Law. If you are facing a charge, get advice about your own circumstances.