The Top 25 Most Influential lawyer dissects policing, policy gaps and digital evidence failures
Wrongful accusations in sexual assault and domestic violence cases have become what criminal defence lawyer Joseph Neuberger has called a “hidden crisis” in Canada’s justice system, a problem he says is being fuelled by politics, police culture, and blind spots in how digital evidence is handled.
Neuberger, a Toronto criminal defence lawyer recently recognized by Canadian Lawyer as one of the Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers, sees the crisis from the front lines. Over the last two decades, his practice has “really morphed into defending mostly sexual and domestic cases,” much of it arising from high-conflict relationships and divorces. He now estimates that almost all his caseload falls into this category and says his firm produces a sexual assault update newsletter because “we think it's really important that everybody is up to date on the changes in the law.”
One recent case crystallized his concerns. His client, a husband charged with abusing his wife, was portrayed as a coercive, violent partner until the defence forced a closer look at the evidence. “I think there’s been a chronic lack of recognition that men in domestic relationships can be abused and can be victims of both violence or emotional abuse,” he says, after courts accepted digital records and expert material showing that the complainant’s account did not match the record.
For Neuberger, the investigative failures exposed in that file are not an isolated incident. He argues that an investigative culture has taken hold in which officers treat complainants’ accounts as presumptively accurate and build cases around them with minimal scrutiny. He points to what he calls a “#believe approach to investigations,” where police conduct “very little probing” during interviews, rarely speak to other potential witnesses, and sometimes skip obvious steps such as visiting scenes. Digital evidence, which should be a safeguard, is often mishandled. He sees officers relying on complainants emailing or uploading whatever screenshots they choose, instead of accessing phones directly and insisting on full threads, dates, and context.
In that environment, Neuberger says, the risk of wrongful prosecutions rises sharply because alternative explanations and exculpatory material are never collected. Police accept a few “cherry-picked messages” from a much larger exchange and build a narrative on that sliver of communication. “They don’t go into the phone. They don’t take a look at dates. They don’t take a look at the threads and messages,” he says, warning that this hands-off approach is increasingly untenable in an era of AI-generated texts and images.
Underneath those practices, he sees classic tunnel vision. Police “start off from the premise that the accused is guilty, and the complainant is truthful,” he says, and then “will only seek out information that confirms that belief.” In his own caseload, Neuberger estimates that in about three out of ten matters, his team can assemble enough independent material to demonstrate that the allegations are demonstrably false; yet, those cases still progressed far enough that clients were charged and forced into the public glare before the story began to unravel.
Resourcing only partly explains that pattern. When he looks at how sexual assault and domestic complaints are handled, Neuberger also sees ideology and politics pushing investigations toward charge-first decisions. He notes that police services have been “chronically underresourced and funded for a long time,” but argues that appellate decisions and public commentary stressing low reporting and conviction rates in sexual assault send a stronger signal: that the system must “do more” by increasing convictions, not by improving investigative rigour.
The impact of those choices does not vanish when the verdict is read. Even when defendants are acquitted after detailed reasons, Neuberger says, “there’s a lot of lasting impact.” Employees can lose their jobs under morality clauses and never be rehired; deep background checks may still reveal that charges were laid; and in family court, opposing counsel may continue to recycle discredited allegations in custody and access disputes. In the most serious cases, he has seen men take their own lives after charges were withdrawn or dismissed because the combination of reputational damage, financial strain, and ongoing litigation left them unable to see a path back.
His prescription starts at the policy level. Neuberger wants political leaders to acknowledge openly that false allegations are not as rare as the public is often told, and to stop using criminal-law reforms as a shortcut to appearing tough on crime. He argues that police protocols must change so that officers work with complainants to obtain complete digital records rather than curated screenshots, while Crown attorneys conduct “enhanced screening and assessment of charges to ensure that there is really a reasonable prospect of conviction,” rather than reflexively sending marginal cases to trial.
At the same time, he is investing in the profession and the public conversation around these issues. Within his firm, Neuberger runs what he calls a “vast mentorship program for younger lawyers” and notes that three of his former associates have become judges. Beyond the office, he has helped build the community through the Canadian Jewish Law Association and has raised significant funds for the Lawyers Feed the Hungry Program through social media campaigns and events, such as the annual Billiards with the Bar fundraiser.
He has also turned to podcasting to widen the debate. Neuberger launched the Not On Record podcast because he was “a little frustrated that there was not enough information out there informing the public,” and he wanted to “try and really educate people so that they have another source of information” about criminal law. Episodes walk listeners through case law, academic studies, and real-world examples; he says the show “sparks debate and dialogue” among young defence counsel and Crown attorneys, and that ongoing conversation is where he now hopes to shift a justice system he still believes is fundamentally strong, but dangerously out of balance in how it treats sexual and domestic violence complaints.
This article is based on an episode of CL Talk, which can also be found here:
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