Law360 Canada ( March 8, 2024, 2:06 PM EST) -- Appeals by the Crown from judgments of the British Columbia Court of Appeal which set aside convictions and ordered new trials. Kruk and Tsang were convicted of sexual assault in separate and unrelated matters. In Kruk’s case, the trial judge had concerns with the reliability of the complainant's testimony given her extreme level of intoxication but overcame his concerns by finding that it was extremely unlikely that a woman would be mistaken about the feeling of having a penis inside her. The Court of Appeal concluded that the trial judge erred in law by engaging in speculative reasoning that was not grounded in the evidence by finding it unlikely that someone would be mistaken about the feeling of penile‑vaginal penetration. In Tsang’s case, the trial judge made the following three assumptions with respect to human behaviour: (1) a person would not ask to be spanked while engaging in sexual foreplay out of the blue; (2) a controlling person would not refrain from engaging in vaginal intercourse because they could not find a condom; and (3) a person would not abruptly and unceremoniously drive away from the person with whom they had engaged in consensual sex. The Court of Appeal found that the trial judge made generalizations about normative behaviour that did not rest on the evidence before her and therefore engaged in impermissible speculative reasoning. In both cases, the convictions were set aside and new trials ordered....