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"At the same time, I have to say to you, that I firmly believe that although the Charter grants us rights, some of which I think are new rights, but some of which are historic rights, at the same time I firmly believe that with every right comes a concomitant responsibility. So I'm not a person that says the Charter is there to protect evil things, in a sense, although it is certainly there to protect every person, some of whom who are evil." In R. v. Sharpe, Peck found a question that certainly challenged widely held ideas and principals. To many people, John Robin Sharpe was seen as the embodiment of "evil." In 1995, he was charged with two counts of possession of child pornography and two counts of distribution of child pornography. At the core of the evidence were volumes of writings depicting fictitious sexual acts with adolescents. In 1999, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Duncan Shaw threw out the charges, writing in his decision that, "there is no evidence which demon- strates an increase in harm to children as a result of pornography." The province appealed to the B.C. Court of Appeal, where it was upheld 2-1. The dissenting opinion was written by McEachern, who argued that, "the protection of persons possessing child pornography, for any purpose, is so far removed from the core values of the Charter that it rates very low on any scale of importance, and the general right of our citizens to the pri- vacy of their lives is threatened hardly at all by this definition." The province appealed, this time to the Supreme Court of Canada. In the 2001 landmark ruling R. v. Sharpe, the SCC ruled that a person could not be pros- ecuted for what they created through imagination for personal use. "At some point, if that case had gone in a certain direction it would ultimately mean that the state could effectively legislate thought," says Peck. "In other words it could prescribe thought, it could preserve the recording of thought, I believe for a democracy to succeed we need a zone of privacy around the indi- vidual." The court did, however, uphold much of Canada's child pornography laws. For Peck, it was the law that seemed to leg- islate thought that most concerned him. "The reductio [ad absurdum] of Sharpe, you see, if it went a certain way was that the state could dictate to a citizen what the citizen could write to himself in the confines of his private study for his personal use and nothing more, or what pictures that person could draw for themselves, for their own use in their own study and not the world. "At some point it went beyond, it reached into what I think is a protected zone of privacy that at its core we should all be prepared to enjoy and work within and that was what disturbed me about it. I saw that legislation as having the po- tential to breach that, to reach into that protected core that had been developed over a number of centuries in terms of protected thought." Today, Peck is involved in just about every facet of the legal profession in B.C. He is the director of the International Society for the Reform of Criminal Law. He is a mentor, adjunct professor at the UBC Law School, and president of the Legal Historical Society of British Co- lumbia. He is also the national co-chair- man, along with Ontario Superior Court Justice Michelle Fuerst, of the Federa- tion of Law Societies of Canada, nation- al criminal law program. The program helps train members of the criminal bar of Canada and the 2008 edition marked the program's 35th year. "If you are a person who cares about the profession, if you like what you do, if you believe that this is in fact a historic, honourable profession, then I think that you tend to become dedicated to ensur- ing that you can do what you can to en- hance its image and enhance its profes- sionalism and assist those you work with," says Peck. "We've got a long his- tory in this country, I think, and cer- tainly in B.C. of collegiality, and I'm talking about the criminal bar, and a long history of assisting each other in various ways and I think these are just manifestations of that, there is no ex- trinsic value in it, it is something you get some gratification out of personally in terms of contributing to the betterment of the profession." www. mag.com NO VEMBER / DECEMBER 2008 39