WATCH: For the second time, a B.C. court stayed all charges against a couple accused of plotting to blow up the B.C. legislature. A decision today from the Court of Appeal agrees that John Nuttall and Amanda Korody were entrapped by the RCMP. Mary Griffin reports.
The B.C. Court of Appeal has upheld a lower court’s ruling to overturn a couple’s terror plot conviction, calling the RCMP investigation a “travesty of justice”.
Justice Elizabeth Bennett writes while the trial judge made some errors, she was not wrong in finding John Nuttall and Amanda Korody were manipulated by RCMP.
John Nuttall and Amanda Korody freed after B.C. Court of Appal upholds lower court stay – finding RCMP investigation was a "travesty of justice"
— Jason Proctor (@proctor_jason) December 19, 2018
In 2015, a jury found Nuttall and Korody guilty in a 2013 Canada Day terror plot at the B.C. legislature on charges of conspiring to commit murder, possessing an explosive substance and placing an explosive in a public place on behalf of a terrorist group.
But the verdict was later thrown out by B.C. Supreme Court Justice Catherine Bruce who ruled the couple had been entrapped by police by using trickery, deceit and veiled threats to engineer the bomb plot.
Defence lawyers claimed the pair feared their lives were in danger if they didn’t carry out the attack and called the plot a manufactured crime mostly orchestrated by police.
The appeal court heard the Crown’s argument at a January appeal hearing that the RCMP operation was neither manipulative nor an abuse of process.
Prosecutors also said Nuttall and Korody were completely responsible for crafting and carrying out the plan of planting explosive devices around the legislature.
John Nuttall and Amanda Korody were found guilty in 2015 of plotting to blow up the provincial legislature in 2013, but a judge later ruled they had been entrapped by police. File photo.
With files from the Canadian Press.
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