A Supremely Stupid Court Decision

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Canada stayed proceedings against Nicole Doucet, who thrice sought to hire a hit-man to kill her then-husband, Mike Ryan. Eight of the nine Justices accepted the unproven contention that Doucet “was the victim of a violent, abusive and controlling husband,” and that “she believed that he would cause her and their daughter serious bodily harm or death and that she had no safe avenue of escape other than having him killed.”

In response, Dalhousie University law professor Archibald Kaiser is calling for a public inquiry to rectify what he is calling a “stain on the justice system.”

A stay of proceedings, he writes in the journal Criminal Reports, has no precedent “without an abuse of process or charter violation” — and neither element is present here. Professor Kaiser adds: “In [the case of Doucet-Ryan], the courts lost their vision of the nature of Canadian society and the function of the criminal law.”

Read the rest of Barbara Kay's column at The National Post