Beating  the  charge  of  attempting  to murder  your  ex-spouse.

 

Canada, like many other countries have trials that when they are concluded, forces us to ask ourselves, “What went wrong?”

 

 

A Nova Scotian couple in Eastern Canada, Nicole Doucet Ryan and Michael Ryan, have one daughter and separated in 2007. In March 2008, Nicole was arrested for trying to hire a hit man (unbeknown to her, an undercover RCMP officer) for $25,000 to kill her ex-husband, Michael.

 

 

The proverbial “breaking point” came after an incident involving their family dog as well as their neighbour’s family dog. In her long testimony at her trial, Nicole described what her husband did to that neighbour’s pet. She said that he took the gun in one hand and the dog in the other, leaving the house and eventually returning to the house without the dog. She claimed that she was forced to witness the before and after of her husband’s actions. When she mentioned divorcing her husband, those murderous scenarios became even more real to her. According to her testimony, her husband painted a vivid picture of how he was going to kill her and their daughter Aimee, and dispose of their bodies.

 

 

According to her moving testimony at her trial, she said that for fifteen years, her husband had isolated, controlled and threatened her verbally and physically. Every week, her husband would pin her against the wall while squeezing her neck. When he was angry, he would throw things that were aimed at her head. On one occasion, her husband, a trained soldier in the Canadian military, put a pistol to her head, calling her a “weak solder” All of the abuse, suffered over all of those years, made the defendant question who she was as a person: “I didn’t really seem to exist as a person,” she lamented adding that she felt “hollow, empty and lost.” She said that she suffered through a reign of terror at his hands and after they were separated, she feared for her life.

 

 

According to her, she could do nothing else but run away. Even though she and her daughter found refuge in friends’ homes and in secluded cottages, she was sure that her husband could find them. According to her, after she had run away, he surprised her at school once. She is a school teacher. So, by late 2007, the so-called terrified woman was brainstorming another alternative. She would hire a hit man to murder her husband. As we all know, he wasn’t murdered.

 

 

At her trial, this woman put up the ‘battered wife’ defence, which is supposed to be only applied in situations where the woman fears imminently for her life which would cause her to suffer from extreme duress. As it turned out, this was clearly not the case in Nicole’s premeditated actions during the time while they were actually separated and living apart. 

 

 

What was her real motive to have her ex-husband killed? Was it because if he was dead, she would regain the custody of her daughter? We will never know. In any case, she would not have regained the custody of her child because she had been previously classified as an unfit mother. 

 

 

Before Nicole made that fateful decision to hire someone to kill her ex-husband, she claimed that she had tried to find alternatives. For instance, she sought the help of the police, who according to her, essentially did not want to meddle in the family disputes. That is utter nonsense. If a woman contacts the police and she tells them that she fears that she will be murdered by her ex-husband, they will get fully involved.  She said that she even phoned Victim Services for a total of eleven times and no one offered to help her. I find that hard to believe especially if a child’s safety is involved.

 

In 2008, the trial judge concluded that the battered woman was at her weakest point in her life. It is not entirely clear what brought the Royal Canadian Mounted Police into the picture. She had previously given a man the $25,000 to do the job so it is possible that it was he who contacted the police about what she wanted done to her ex-husband. However, in any case, one evening, an undercover police officer called her, and offered to do the job for $25,000. Nicole took the bait. Shortly thereafter, she was arrested, charged and remanded for mental assessment in a hospital.  

 

Nicole was first acquitted of the charge of counseling to commit murder by the Nova Scotia Supreme Court in 2010. Because she did not go through with it, she was subsequently officially charged with counseling an offence that was not committed, as prescribed by section 464 of the Canadian Criminal Code.

 

 

The trial judge accepted that Nicole Doucet had nowhere to go and no way out of her abusive marriage to Michael Ryan. Not only did the trial judge point to the ineffectiveness of the police and Victim Services to protect her, but he also believed the defendant’s testimony about her traditional views on marriage; she was committed to making that marriage work, so she would not have walked away easily. How could he presume that the police and Victim Services wouldn’t help her? They weren’t called to the stand. The Nova Scotia Court of Appeal subsequently upheld that ruling, concluding that the marriage amounted to a “reign of terror”. They too, accepted her testimony in her trial.

 

 

When someone suffers from extreme duress which is a defence available to that person if he or she commits a homicide to save him or herself but the person he or she kills has to be the person that causes the immediate duress.

 

Compulsion by threats is defined in section 17 of the Criminal Code, which outlines how the Code could excuse would-be offenders in certain prescribed circumstances such as;

 

17. A person who commits an offence under compulsion by threats of immediate death or bodily harm from a person who is present when the offence is committed is excused for committing the offence if the person believes that the threats will be carried out and if the person is not a party to a conspiracy or association whereby the person is subject to compulsion, but this section does not apply where the offence that is committed is high treason or treason, murder, piracy, attempted murder, sexual assault, sexual assault with a weapon, threats to a third party or causing bodily harm, aggravated sexual assault, forcible abduction, hostage taking, robbery, assault with a weapon or causing bodily harm, aggravated assault, unlawfully causing bodily harm, arson. unquote

 

You will note that the person who presents the threat has to be in the immediate presence of the victim of the threat. Nichole’s ex-husband was previously nowhere near her when later she told the RCMP officer that he threated to kill her.

 

However, I would be less than honest if I didn’t mention that the Supreme Court also ruled in a previous case that;

 

“Section. 17′s reliance on proximity as opposed to reasonable options as the measure of moral choice is problematic. It would be contrary to the principles of fundamental justice to punish an accused who is psychologically tortured to the point of seeing no reasonable alternative, or who cannot rely on the authorities for assistance. That individual is not behaving as an autonomous agent acting out of his own free will when he commits an offence under duress.” unquote

 

 

In other words, a person can be in imminent peril if he or she receives a phone call in which the caller threatens to kill that person. What makes the call really terrifying is expecting to be murdered but not knowing when or where it will happen.

 

I suppose that being the case, if the judge was aware of that particular ruling by the Supreme Court, he would have considered that as a compelling issue to deal with in her favour.

 

He would have had a different view of the case had her heard testimony from the woman’s ex-husband.

 

 

Why wasn’t her ex-husband called into court to give his side of the story? Actually he had been subpoenaed by the crown attorney (prosecutor) to give evidence at her trial as a rebuttal witness so he waited outside the courthouse in his car waiting for the cell phone message telling him that he was about to be called into court to give evidence. As it turned out, he wasn’t called by the prosecutor at all.

 

Why not? Apparently, the prosecutor came to the erroneous conclusion that because Nicole’s evidence was so highly unconvincing, his case against her was a slam dunk case for him to win so he decided that Michael’s evidence wasn’t needed.

 

 

I can’t imagine a more stupid decision than that one done by a prosecutor who has to be high on the dumb list of really dumb people. No one, be he or she a defence lawyer or prosecutor should omit using rebuttal witnesses but that dummy did. And it cost him his case. It should have cost him his job. Imagine if you will, being a victim and being represented in court by that dummy.

 

 

I practiced law in criminal, civil and family courts for many years before I retired and I always called my witnesses to the stand and I let the court decide which one of the witnesses giving evidence was telling the truth. Even though I felt on many occasions that my client’s cases were slam dunks, I realized how important my client’s witnesses were and that is why I called them in court to give evidence and why I won 80 percent of my cases in court.  

 

 

If Michael had been called, he says he would have explained to the court that none of the events enunciated by Nicole ever happened; that they were living apart at the time of her allegations; that he was parenting their daughter because psychological assessments of them both had raised questions about Nicole’s ability to care for the daughter; that Nicole had stopped communicating with the daughter of her own accord; and that Nicole’s testimony was simply one false allegation after another.

 

 

Both the Nova Scotia Appeal Court and the Supreme Court of Canada have ruled that the trial judge erred in acquitting Nicole without making more enquiries about her testimony. Obviously, had the trial judge heard Michael’s rebuttal evidence, the judge would have convicted her. In other words, both courts of appeal concluded that what Nicole had told the court about her husband was totally unsubstantiated, and therefore her acquittal would have been rightfully been overturned. That tells you something about the trail judge. He too was a dummy.

 

 

Does that mean that Nicole would be tried again? No it doesn’t and that is because the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the procedures against her were permanently stayed. Because it was stayed, as in this particular case, it means that she can’t be tried again for that same charge of counseling an offence that was not committed.

 

 

The reasoning of the Supreme Court was that Niciole had been through enough already. Give me a break. Many accused persons who have to sit through a second trial have been through enough but justice demands that the second trials go on nevertheless.

                   

 

Archibald Kaiser, a law professor in Nova Scotia remarked after learning of the ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada, “I can’t see how this case became such a mess.” I can. The prosecutor and the jurists made stupid decisions. It is as simple as that. The court’s presumption that the police were at fault for not heeding the woman’s pleas for help (without actually hearing the police’s evidence to rebut the woman’s claim that they ignored her) is a sign of stupidity on the part of the judge and of course the prosecutor also for not calling them in the first place. The trial was a farce. Imagine if you will, being tried for a criminal offence in a court with those two twits dealing with your case.  Further, the stay of the proceedings by the Supreme Court was most inappropriate. The professor also said (and he is right) that there is no precedent to stay proceedings without an abuse of process or a Charter violation and in this case, there was no such abuse.

 

 

Michael Ryan who obviously was innocent of any wrongdoing has been subjected to an event in his life that he should not have been subjected to in the first place. If the stupid prosecutor had done his job properly, he wouldn’t have suffered as he has from the unsubstantiated allegations made by his ex-wife.  His new life with a military woman in Ontario, with his daughter and a new baby, has been turned into shambles. He had been branded a monster by the media. That too was a terrible mistake on their part. He should sue any newspapers that called him a monster considering that the two appeal courts ruled that his ex-wife’s allegations were unsubstantiated. Further, in a Youtube address, Michael denied every single allegation, adding a great deal of background about Nicole that painted a very different portrait from her own self-presentation.

 

This evil woman was given the opportunity to give her side of her story in court so her ex-husband should have been given the same opportunity to give his side of the story also in court which he wasn’t because of the stupidity of the prosecutor and the blunder of the members of the Supreme Court of Canada. 

 

 

The legal issue at the centre of this case is undue duress and self-defence. The landmark case of R v Lavellee, a case heard by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1990 allowed the lower courts to recognize ‘battered woman syndrome’ as a defence. In that particular case, a woman, who was in an abusive existing relationship with her partner, killed him and subsequently she used the Criminal Code’s self-defence provisions to get herself acquitted. But in the case I am writing about, Nicole and Michael were not living together. They were completely separated and Michael had no reason whatsoever to have any contact with Nicole so why would she fear for her life?  There was no reason at all for her to fear for her life.

 

 

There would be little doubt that, had she shot her husband to death herself following a physical altercation in which she feared for her life while they were living together or they were separated and he ended up in her house, she would have been able to declare that it was done out of self-defense, particularly given her version of the history of trauma she endured in her marriage in which the only person who could rebut her evidence was dead.

 

This was a case that was bungled from the beginning. The woman should have been convicted in the first place and the Supreme Court was in my respectful opinion wrong in their decision to stay the proceedings against her permanently.

 

There are several saving graces about this case however. She lost all the money she gave to the first man she approached and at least half of the money she gave to the police. She can’t claim it back because it is contrary to public policy to claim money a person uses to commit a crime, even when the crime isn’t committed. Also, she has permamently lost her right to ever have her daughter returned to her and I doubt that her ex-husband will permit his ex-wife to have access to their daughter while the child is in his care.

 

Further, if any other man is seriously considering wooing her, he should look in any of the search engines and read about how she escaped being convicted of attempting to bring about the murder her ex-husband. If that information won’t keep her single for the rest of her life, I can’t imagine what will. When you look at this case, you will realize that it was she who became the real victim. Her victimizer was herself.