Windsor Criminal Defence Lawyers

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Most pages about a criminal charge explain the court process. This one begins somewhere else, with what the charge does to the rest of your life, because in Windsor that is the part people are genuinely frightened of. Criminal matters here are heard by the Ontario Court of Justice at 200 Chatham Street East. The Superior Court of Justice sits in a separate building at 245 Windsor Avenue. And the city itself sits on an international border that treats a Canadian criminal record as its own business, whatever an Ontario judge decides. We are a Toronto firm. We have no office in Windsor, and we put that in the third heading rather than the last paragraph.

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

What a Windsor charge can do to your ability to cross into the United States

Everywhere else in Ontario the border is an abstraction. In Windsor it is the route to a job, a parent, a hockey game, a cheaper flight. So this page starts where the worry starts.

The Government of Canada publishes travel advice for the United States, and the passage on criminal records is blunt. It states that if you have a criminal record, no matter the severity or the date of the offence, you may be refused entry to the United States. It adds that a pardon for an offence issued by Canadian authorities is not recognized under U.S. law to enter the United States. A record suspension closes a Canadian file. It does not close an American one.

The same advice notes that U.S. ports of entry are computerized and connected to a centralized database, that information is readily available on convictions in both countries, and that having crossed without trouble before is no guarantee about the next crossing. It warns that attempting entry without a waiver could result in several weeks of detention and a permanent bar. There is a route for someone found inadmissible: an application to U.S. Customs and Border Protection for a temporary waiver of inadmissibility, which Canadian citizens may also make at land borders.

Two honest limits belong here. None of that is American immigration advice and we do not offer any; if admissibility is your central concern, bring in someone who does U.S. waiver work, and do it before a plea rather than after one. And all of it turns on what the Canadian file eventually says, which is decided at 200 Chatham Street East long before anyone hands a passport through a booth window. If you are already living with a record, the Canadian side of that is a separate conversation about a record suspension, and it is not a border fix.

Where the consequence gets decided: two courthouses, one name, different jobs

Windsor is unusual, and the unusual part causes real problems. There are two separate court buildings here and the Ministry of the Attorney General lists both under the same name, Windsor Courthouse.

The Ontario Court of Justice, where the great majority of criminal charges begin and many of them end, is at 200 Chatham Street East, N9A 2W3. The Ministry listing for that building shows Criminal, Criminal youth, the Crown Attorney’s Office, Family and the Victim and Witness Assistance Program, and no Civil, Enforcement or Small claims. Court offices run Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with counter service from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. French language services are available there over the phone and at the counter.

The Superior Court of Justice is at 245 Windsor Avenue, N9A 1J2, and its listing adds Civil, Enforcement and Small claims alongside criminal work. Superior Court criminal scheduling in Windsor covers trials, judicial pre-trials, bail hearings and reviews, ninety day detention reviews, applications and motions, and assignment court.

Building	Court	What sits there
200 Chatham St. E., N9A 2W3	Ontario Court of Justice	Criminal, criminal youth, Crown Attorney’s Office, family, victim and witness assistance. Most criminal charges start here.
245 Windsor Ave., N9A 1J2	Superior Court of Justice	Civil, criminal, enforcement, family, small claims. Criminal trials by election, bail reviews, detention reviews.
7 Clark St. W., Leamington, N8H 1E5	Ontario Court of Justice satellite	Criminal, criminal youth, family, small claims. Limited services, and court fees cannot be paid there.
City Hall Square East	City of Windsor, Provincial Offences	Provincial Offences Act matters and by-laws. No Criminal Code charge is heard here.

The street line on your paperwork governs, not the name at the top of it. If a bail hearing is what brings you here, the first appearance after arrest runs through the Ontario Court of Justice side, and the rules shaping it are on our Ontario bail page. We publish no bail courtroom number for Windsor, because the Court publishes none and the firm websites that give one disagree with each other.

No Windsor office: what that changes for you, and what it does not

Search the term you searched and you will mostly find Toronto firms. What none of them tells you is that they are Toronto firms. We will.

Start with entitlement, because it is asked first and the answer is short. A lawyer’s licence in this province comes from the Law Society of Ontario and it covers the whole province. There is no local licence, no local call and no local registration for the Windsor courthouse. A Toronto lawyer appears there on exactly the same footing as a lawyer whose office is across the road. The real questions are practical ones about attendance, not permission.

Now the part that gets misrepresented constantly. Remote attendance is not a right and it is not the norm. Section 715.21 of the Criminal Code makes in person attendance the default for anyone who appears at, participates in or presides at a proceeding. Everything else is a carve out a judicial officer controls. Section 715.23 sets the test for allowing an accused or offender to appear remotely, weighing their location and personal circumstances, the cost of appearing in person, the suitability of the remote location, the right to a fair and public hearing, and the nature and seriousness of the offence. The provision covering defence counsel is a different one, section 715.25, which treats counsel as a participant and applies a comparable test, with a costs rule at subsection (5). Competitor pages blur those two sections routinely. They are not interchangeable. The stage provisions at sections 715.231 through 715.241 then cover preliminary inquiries, trials, pleas and sentencings, each with its own consent requirements. A court refusing a remote request must give reasons on the record under section 715.221, and under section 715.222 it may end a remote appearance at any time.

On top of the statute sits the practice direction in force, Mode of Appearance for Ontario Court of Justice Criminal Proceedings, issued by Chief Justice Sharon Nicklas under rules 1.4 and 5 of the Criminal Rules and last updated 31 March 2025. It supersedes the earlier guidelines, which the Court states are no longer in effect. It draws a line that matters to anyone weighing an out of town firm.

Stage	Mode of appearance
First appearance after arrest, contested bail, consent releases and remands	Accused persons appear by video unless the Court directs otherwise. Sureties may appear in person or by video.
Case management, including intensive case management and trial confirmation	Out of custody accused persons and counsel may appear virtually or in person unless directed otherwise. Counsel attending virtually are expected to appear by video.
Judicial pre-trials	Conducted by video unless otherwise directed.
Guilty pleas and sentencings	All participants in person unless the Court allows a virtual plea, on a consent application expected at least three business days before the plea date.
Trials and preliminary inquiries	All participants in person unless a judge orders otherwise, normally on written application under rule 2.4.

Then there is section B(1), which most firm pages skip because it is inconvenient. Because private consultation across mixed modes is difficult, Crown and defence counsel are expected to attend all criminal proceedings other than case management appearances in person if the accused person is appearing in person, unless a judicial officer directs otherwise. Translated: if you are standing in that courtroom, so are we. Nobody can honestly promise a case run entirely from a screen.

So here is the honest division of labour. Case management appearances and judicial pre-trials are where distance stops mattering, and much of the substantive work, disclosure review, Crown negotiation, drafting and strategy, was never geographic in the first place. Trials, preliminary inquiries, pleas and sentencings need a person in the room, and that is a travel commitment we either make or decline the file. We run the same arrangement on our Kitchener and Waterloo and Ottawa files, and we describe it the same way there.

What it does to your work, during the case and after it ends

A criminal case costs you working days before it costs you anything else, and Windsor has a scheduling quirk that decides which day you lose. The Ontario Court of Justice publishes a weekly schedule for the Windsor and Leamington virtual case management courts, and it sorts adult criminal matters by the first letter of your surname.

Day	Whose matters are listed
Monday	All federal matters, all youth matters and all section 810 matters
Tuesday	Adult criminal matters, surnames A to D
Wednesday	Adult criminal matters, surnames E to K
Thursday	Adult criminal matters, surnames L to Q
Friday	Adult criminal matters, surnames R to Z

Within the day there are tiers: counsel matters at 9 a.m., agent and law student matters at 10 a.m., a morning break at 11:15, first appearances without counsel and duty counsel matters at 11:30, lunch at 1 p.m., then duty counsel matters and the remaining self represented accused persons at 2:15. Windsor also runs a Judge-led Intensive Case Management Court in Courtroom 10 on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 2:15 p.m., and a trial readiness court on the Tuesday of the week before, at 9:30 a.m., for all matters. Check your own paperwork first, always, because the date on it governs over any general schedule.

You can also stop attending routine dates altogether in many cases. Windsor publishes a dedicated filing address for Enhanced Designations of Counsel, and under the Court’s practice direction a represented accused who has filed one can have matters adjourned without personally appearing. That is not a small thing when every appearance is a shift you do not work.

The longer consequence is the record. We have written separately about working in Canada with a criminal record, and the short version is that the outcome matters far more than the accusation.

What it does to your status in Canada if you are not a citizen

Windsor draws people from everywhere, and a large number of those charged here hold permanent residence, a work permit, a study permit or a visitor record rather than a Canadian passport. For them the criminal case and the immigration case are the same case, though they are heard in different places by different decision makers.

The mechanics matter before anyone discusses a resolution. Immigration consequences in Canada attach to the outcome and, critically, to the sentence imposed and the maximum sentence available for the offence charged. Two resolutions that feel identical to a Canadian citizen can be wildly different for someone who is not one.

Which is why sequence matters. Counsel has to know your status before negotiating, not after. A resolution proposed in good faith by a Crown who does not know your situation can be catastrophic to accept and entirely fixable to renegotiate, if someone raises it in time. Once sentence is imposed the options narrow sharply.

We deal with this intersection regularly and have set out how it works on our page about criminal charges and immigration consequences in Ontario. What matters on a Windsor file is that you volunteer your status at the first meeting, even if nobody asks. It is not a detail, and it is the fact most often left out of a first call because the person assumes it is irrelevant. One caution: Canadian immigration consequences and American admissibility are separate problems with separate rules and separate decision makers. Solving one does nothing for the other, and in this city people frequently have both.

What it does to your driver’s licence, and what it does not

Driving offences generate more confusion per charge than anything else, mostly because two different systems act on the same event and neither waits politely for the other.

The first distinction is which statute you are charged under. A Criminal Code driving offence is a criminal charge, it is heard at 200 Chatham Street East, and a conviction produces a criminal record with everything that follows from it, including the border consequence at the top of this page. A Highway Traffic Act charge is a provincial offence. It is administered by the City of Windsor out of City Hall Square East, it is not heard in a criminal courtroom, and it does not produce a criminal record.

The second distinction is that licence consequences often arrive long before any finding of guilt, by administrative action rather than judicial order. That is a separate track with its own timelines and its own routes of challenge.

The third is that driving while your licence is under suspension is a fresh offence in its own right, and it frequently does more damage than the charge that caused the suspension. It looks like defiance on a record even when it was desperation about getting to work.

Our Ontario driving offence page sets out how the criminal side is defended. On a Windsor file, raise the licence question in the first conversation, because the administrative clock does not pause while the criminal matter works through the case management list.

What it does to your right to own or handle a firearm

This consequence lands hardest on people who never thought of themselves as having anything to do with firearms law: hunters in Essex County, farmers, sport shooters, people who inherited a rifle from a grandparent, people whose job involves a licence.

Two things happen and they happen at different speeds. The first is immediate and comes from bail. Where a charge involves violence, threats or a weapon, a weapons prohibition and an order to surrender firearms and licences is a routine condition of release, and it takes effect long before anyone decides whether you did anything. It is a condition, not a punishment, but breaching it is a fresh criminal charge and courts treat it as a serious one.

The second comes at the end. Certain convictions trigger prohibition orders as a mandatory consequence of sentence rather than a discretionary one, and the length is fixed by statute rather than argued. Other offences leave the court a discretion. Which category your charge falls into is a question worth asking at the outset, because it can change what resolution is worth pursuing. A person can reasonably accept one outcome and refuse another purely because of what it does to a licence they need.

Our Ontario firearms offence page covers the charges themselves. The point for this page is narrower: a firearms consequence can arrive from a charge that has nothing obvious to do with firearms, and it can arrive on day one.

What actually shows up on a record check, and what stays off it

Almost everyone worrying about a record is worrying about the wrong thing, because almost everyone assumes there is one record and one check. There are several kinds of check and they disclose different things.

The broad shape is this. A basic criminal record check looks for convictions. A check that goes further can pick up a wider range of police contact, and the broadest category, used for positions of trust involving children and vulnerable adults, can surface material that never produced a conviction at all. That is why people are sometimes astonished to find that a withdrawn charge has appeared in a screening result years later, and why the outcome you negotiate is only part of the answer.

The practical consequence is that the goal is not merely avoiding a conviction. It is closing the file in the way that leaves the least behind, and that calculation differs depending on what you do for a living, what you intend to do later, whether you cross a border, and whether you hold a licence someone else can revoke.

Fingerprints and photographs deserve a note of their own. Where they have been taken, there is a process for having them dealt with once a charge does not result in a conviction, and it does not happen automatically. It is a step counsel can raise at the right moment, and it gets forgotten precisely because it comes after the relief of the case ending.

What it does to a family file, and where bail conditions collide with your children

Both Windsor court buildings carry family matters, and many people charged with a domestic offence are simultaneously living through a separation. The two files run in parallel, on different timetables, before judges who are not talking to each other.

The collision usually starts with a release order. Conditions prohibiting contact with a complainant, or requiring you to stay away from a residence, are common on domestic charges. They are drafted for public safety, not for parenting. If that residence is also where your children live, a condition written in one courtroom can effectively suspend a parenting arrangement made in another, and the criminal condition wins until it is varied.

Handled early, most of this is manageable. Conditions can often be varied to permit contact through a third party, or for the purpose of exercising parenting time under a family order, or through a written channel. Those variations are far easier to obtain before a breach than after one. Our page on domestic misconduct while on bail deals with what happens when the two files collide badly. The advice for a Windsor file is unglamorous and it works: read the release order in full the day you get it, and ask about anything ambiguous before it becomes a question for a judge.

What changes if the charge was laid in Essex County rather than the city

The city boundary is not a legal fiction. It changes who investigated, where your matter is returnable and, sometimes, how a case moves.

Within the City of Windsor the police service of jurisdiction is the Windsor Police Service, with its headquarters at 150 Goyeau Street. Worth noting, because it is genuinely unusual and the service says it itself: the Windsor Police Service states on its own facilities page that its headquarters facility also incorporates a provincial courthouse. We repeat it as the service publishes it and draw no conclusion from it about which building your matter is in.

Outside the city, policing in Essex County is arranged differently across municipalities, including by Ontario Provincial Police detachments. Those arrangements have changed over the years and we do not publish a municipality by municipality list, because getting it wrong is worse than staying general. What we will say is that the identity of the investigating service changes who holds the notes, the video and the disclosure, and it can change the pace at which material arrives.

Geographically, some Essex County matters are returnable at the Leamington Courthouse, 7 Clark Street West, N8H 1E5. The Ministry states that a limited number of services are available there and that court fees cannot be paid at that location. The Ontario Court of Justice runs a combined Windsor and Leamington virtual case management schedule, so the weekly surname structure described earlier applies across both. One caution: the Court has warned generally that some satellite courts lack the technology to accommodate virtual appearances and that in person attendance may be required for certain case management appearances at those locations. We do not promise remote attendance at a satellite court without confirming it for your specific date.

Which of the four endings you get, and what each one costs you afterwards

Every consequence on this page is really a consequence of one thing: how the file closes. So it is worth being precise about the four common endings, because people use the words loosely and the differences are enormous.

First, who you negotiate with. In Windsor the provincial Crown Attorney’s Office covers both court buildings on a single contact and prosecutes most Criminal Code matters. Federal prosecutions, including drug offences, are handled differently here than in London, Kitchener or Ottawa: rather than an in house federal office, the work is conducted by a private standing agent on behalf of the Public Prosecution Service of Canada. We do not publish that firm’s name or its contacts on a marketing page, and neither should anyone else. The structural point is the useful one. A federal file in Windsor means a different prosecutor, a different disclosure route and often a different approach to resolution, and Monday is the day federal matters are listed.

A withdrawal means the Crown stops the prosecution. No finding of guilt, no conviction. It is the cleanest ending available, although a withdrawn charge is not automatically invisible to every kind of screening, and fingerprints taken at the outset are dealt with by a separate process that has to be started.

A peace bond resolves the charge without a criminal conviction by binding you to conditions for a defined period. It is not nothing: there are conditions to comply with and a breach is its own offence. But it closes the file without a conviction, which is why it is often worth pursuing. Our Ontario peace bond page explains how they are negotiated.

A discharge, absolute or conditional, follows a finding of guilt but is not a conviction. That distinction does real work with employers, licensing bodies and immigration analysis. What it does not reliably do is satisfy a foreign border officer reading a database entry, which returns this page to where it began.

A conviction is the ending every consequence above attaches to most firmly. It is also, frequently, the ending that was avoidable if someone had read the disclosure properly and early.

What waiting costs you, in the one Ontario city where the cost is measured at a booth

Doing nothing feels like a neutral choice. It is not. It is a decision with a price, and the price is paid in options that quietly expire.

Disclosure is the clearest example. The obligation to disclose is not a formality, but material has to be requested, reviewed and chased. Video from a cruiser, a business, a transit system or a residential camera is the most perishable evidence there is, and third party recordings frequently overwrite themselves on a cycle measured in days. Nobody preserves it because you intend to get a lawyer eventually. A preservation request sent in week one and one sent in month four are not the same request.

The same is true of witnesses, whose memories are best early and whose availability declines. It is true of bail conditions, which can often be varied on consent while nothing has gone wrong and become much harder to vary after an allegation of breach. It is true of resolution discussions, which happen in a different atmosphere before a trial date has been burned than after.

And it is true in a way specific to this city. Every consequence above, the border, the work, the status, the licence, the firearm, the record check, follows from how the file closes. That closing is shaped in the first weeks, by whether the disclosure was read, whether the right questions were put to the right prosecutor, and whether anyone flagged your status or your licence or your travel before a resolution was proposed. By the time you are at a booth explaining yourself, all of those decisions have already been made. Our criminal defence overview sets out how a case moves through the Ontario system from arrest onward.

Why Kazandji Law

Kazandji Law is a Toronto criminal defence firm with four offices across the Greater Toronto Area. None of them is in Windsor or in Essex County. We travel to 200 Chatham Street East to appear, and we would rather write that sentence plainly than suggest an address we do not hold.

• 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, which is why release conditions and parenting time get attention here. The criminal work runs across bail, driving offences, assault and domestic matters, drugs, weapons, fraud and property offences, sexual offences and youth matters.

What we offer a Windsor file is a defence run properly and described honestly: disclosure read early, the prosecution structure understood, your status and your licence and your travel on the table before anyone talks about resolution, and a straight answer about which appearances we attend in person. What we will not offer is the pretence of a local presence. If your matter genuinely needs a lawyer in Windsor every week, we will tell you that on the first call, and we will tell you before you have paid us anything.

Twelve things people ask us about a Windsor charge

This page is general information about criminal procedure in Windsor and Essex County and it is not legal advice. Reading it does not create a solicitor and client relationship with Kazandji Law. Nothing here is advice about United States immigration or admissibility, which is governed by American law and decided by American officials; the border material above is attributed to the Government of Canada and you should obtain advice from a practitioner who handles United States waivers. Court locations, schedules, office hours and contact details change, so confirm anything time sensitive with the court before relying on it. If you have been charged, speak with a lawyer about your own circumstances.