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VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — A Canadian couple found guilty of terror charges will walk free after a judge ruled Friday they were entrapped by the country's national police force in a police-manufactured crime.
Justice Catherine Bruce of the British Columbia Supreme Court said police instigated and skillfully engineered the acts committed by John Nuttall and Amanda Korody, who believed they were planting pressure-cooker bombs that would blow up at the provincial legislature on Canada Day in 2013.
"The world has enough terrorists. We do not need the police to create more out of marginalized people," Bruce said in a landmark ruling.
"The defendants were the foot soldiers but the undercover officer was the leader of the group," she said. "Without the police it would have been impossible for the defendants to carry out the pressure-cooker plan."
A jury found Nuttall and Korody guilty in June 2015 of three terrorism-related charges, but Bruce delayed registering the convictions at the request of defense lawyers, who wanted to argue the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had entrapped their clients.
The case marks the first time in Canada that the legal defense of entrapment has been successfully argued in a terrorism case. Three previous attempts failed.
Bruce said officers overstepped their authority during a months-long, undercover sting and their actions were egregious.
"The police decided they had to aggressively engineer and plan for Nuttall and Korody and make them think it was their own," she said.
"To say they were unsophisticated is generous," she said, adding there was no imminent threat to the public from a pair who demonstrated they were not intelligent but naive.
An entrapment finding means Bruce will issue a stay of proceedings, which throws out the jury's guilty verdict.
It won't appear on any criminal record and can't be used against the couple in the future. Had they been convicted, Nuttall and Korody would have a maximum sentence of life in prison.
A stay of proceedings has the same end result but is different than an acquittal, which is a finding of not guilty.
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