Hybrid offence
Class of offence in common law jurisdictions
A hybrid offence, dual offence, Crown option offence, dual procedure offence, offence triable either way, or wobbler is one of the special class offences in the common law jurisdictions where the case may be prosecuted either summarily or on indictment. In the United States, an alternative misdemeanor/felony offense (colloquially known as a wobbler) lists both county jail (misdemeanor sentence) and state prison (felony sentence) as possible punishment, for example, for theft.
Canada
The power to choose under which class a hybrid offence will be tried rests with the crown counsel. Hybrid offences can either be summary offences (minor crimes) or indictable offences (major crimes). For most indictable offences, a person has the right to trial by jury.
A hybrid offence is the most common type of charge in Canada. There are three types of charges and each will affect when one can apply for a Record Suspension.
Under the Criminal Records Act, Section 2.1, the Parole Board of Canada is the administrative tribunal that has the exclusive authority to make decisions regarding Record Suspensions. A Record Suspension is a formal means to remove the disadvantages associated with having a Criminal Record for people that have been convicted of a criminal offence. In order to apply for a Record Suspension an individual must complete an application that is later reviewed by the Board and a decision to grant, or deny the application is made by an officer.
“Hybrid offence” enters the record as class of offence in common law jurisdictions. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hybrid, offence and Class can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Hybrid offence” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Hybrid, offence and Class provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3150885. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Hybrid offence”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Hybrid offence primary sources, Hybrid offence archive and Hybrid research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Hybrid offence” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.