The Sentencing Gap: What Canada's Reasonable-Time Ruling Offers Ghana's Criminal Courts
The Legal Question
The right to be tried within a reasonable time is a cornerstone of fair-process guarantees in common law criminal systems. In Ghana, Article 19(2)(d) of the 1992 Constitution entrenches this right. The practical question that persistently troubles practitioners is whether the right applies only to the period between charge and verdict, or whether it also covers the interval between conviction and sentencing. On 11 September 2026, the Supreme Court of Canada addressed precisely this question in R.\u0020v. R.B.-C. (2026 SCC 30), holding that the Charter right extends to sentencing but that fixed presumptive ceilings designed for pre-trial delay cannot be transplanted to the post-verdict phase.
The Canadian Framework and Its Limits
The Court confirmed that the 18-month and 30-month presumptive ceilings from R. v. Jordan (2016) do not apply to sentencing delays. Those ceilings were crafted to address a documented culture of systemic complacency in pre-trial preparation. The Court found no comparable evidence of a systemic delay problem at the sentencing stage to justify a separate fixed ceiling. Instead, it reaffirmed the "markedly longer" test, under which a delay is unreasonable if it is markedly longer than what would reasonably be expected given the case's complexity and other contextual factors. Applying the test, the Court found the delay in the appeal was indeed unreasonably long, but determined the appropriate remedy was a sentence reduction rather than a stay of proceedings.
The Ghanaian Context
Ghanaian courts have historically applied a totality-of-circumstances approach to reasonable-time claims, consistent with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Ghana is a party. The practical effect of the Canadian ruling is not to impose a new test on Ghanaian courts but to offer a structured comparative benchmark. It confirms three propositions of direct relevance: first, that the reasonable-time right does reach the sentencing phase; second, that fixed ceilings are not the only or necessarily the best analytical tool for that phase; and third, that the remedy for post-verdict delay need not be a stay but can be calibrated to the prejudice actually suffered.
For a jurisdiction where court backlogs and resource constraints are well documented, this last point carries particular weight. A stay of proceedings as the automatic consequence of any post-verdict delay could paradoxically reward offenders where the state's only fault is administrative congestion. A calibrated remedy, such as a sentence reduction proportionate to the delay, better aligns the constitutional guarantee with the underlying purpose of the right, which is to protect the accused from the anxiety and uncertainty of an overstretched criminal process.
A Fair but Critical Thesis
The Canadian Court's refusal to extend Jordan's fixed ceilings to sentencing is legally defensible but analytically incomplete. The Court grounded its reasoning in the absence of "comparable evidence" of systemic delay at the sentencing stage. This is a factual assertion that will shift as data on post-verdict delays in Canadian courts mature. More importantly for comparative purposes, it reveals a tension: fixed ceilings are administratively simple and reduce judicial discretion, which promotes consistency, but they are also rigid and may not fit the variable pace of sentencing work, which often involves presentence reports, victim impact statements and the coordination of multiple sentencing circles or statutory frameworks.
The Ghanaian court system faces a similar tension. Introducing fixed presumptive ceilings for sentencing delays would simplify the reasonable-time analysis and give defendants a clearer normative expectation. However, without robust data on the causes of post-verdict delay, a fixed ceiling risks becoming either too generous to protect the right or too strict to be attainable, thereby generating a flood of successful challenges that further burden an already strained judiciary.
A careful comparative lesson
The reported Canadian decision offers a way to ask better questions about delay after a verdict. Courts can examine the length of the sentencing interval, the reasons given for it, steps taken by the parties and the concrete effect on the person awaiting sentence. That is a framework for analysis, not a claim that Canadian constitutional rules automatically govern Ghanaian proceedings. Any Ghanaian application must begin with the applicable domestic constitutional text, legislation and binding decisions.
An inflexible time limit may be simple to administer, but it can ignore the facts of an individual case. Unbounded discretion carries the opposite risk: an unexplained delay may never receive effective scrutiny. Published reasons, reliable scheduling records and prompt review where delay becomes serious offer a practical middle course. The broader principle is that a criminal process should remain fair and accountable until sentence, not merely until a verdict is announced.