With Malice Aforethought

Evidence upon which the Supreme Court of Canada based its decision in reaching a verdict that would effectively acquit a Nova Scotia woman from any further judicial and criminal action has been repudiated entirely by the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP. Nicole Ryan Doucet, arrested, charged and standing trial for the crime of hiring hit men to murder her husband, delivered a series of conflicting statements to investigators, claiming herself to have been a dreadfully abused wife.

What should have been a warning clarion in her claims of abuse was not only the fact that she had declared repeatedly, to police who had responded to numerous marital conflict calls that she had not been abused, but also the fact that she had been long separated, living apart from her ex-husband at the time she had attempted to hire hit-men to murder her ex-husband. And it was he who had been declared the fit parent to care for their sole child after a psychiatric assessment, not she.

During her trial, Nicole Ryan Doucet used the defence claim of "duress" as a culpable explanation for her actions. That she had been a horribly abused woman whom police agencies had time and again failed to assist in her existential dilemma. Another possible reason for her claims of abuse being excused might possibly lay in the fact that she also accused her father of physical abuse and that her sister had at one juncture gone to police claiming that she had attempted vehicular homicide on her.

The Supreme Court found that "duress" was non applicable in her case, but at the same time ordered a "stay of Proceedings". Effectively indicating that legal prosecution against Ms. Doucet must cease. The reason cited was the "abuse which she suffered at the hands of Mr. [Michael] Ryan took an enormous toll on her. It would not be fair to subject Ms. Ryan to another trial", they wrote.

Now, the findings of the complaints commission, independent of the RCMP, contradicts Ms. Doucet's claims of having sought and been repeatedly denied police help. "It is my conclusion that the RCMP did not refuse to assist Ms. Doucet. On the contrary, RCMP members were responsive to the family's conflicts. I conclude that the RCMP acted reasonably in each of its dealings with Ms. Doucet and her family, and did not fail to protect her", wrote Ian McPhail, the commission's acting chair.

Quite an amazingly difficult conclusion from that which the Supreme Court had reached when they criticized the RCMP for not having acted to protect this woman from what she claimed was an abusive husband: "On the record before us, it seems that the authorities were much quicker to respond to intervene to protect Mr. Ryan than they had been to respond to [Ms. Doucet's] request for help in dealing with his reign of terror over her." 

Laudable under some circumstances -- the fact being that all too many women in dysfunctional relationships do suffer dreadful abuse from their partners -- but in this instance there simply existed no reign of terror, other than what this sociopathic woman foisted by her spitefully hateful, malicious personality. There are such people, and they do fully as much damage to human relations as people who strike out physically to brutalize others.

Archibald Kaiser, a professor at Dalhousie University's Schulich School of Law in Halifax opined that Ms. Doucet was exempt from another trial as a result of double-jeopardy protections under the law. "A stay of proceedings is tantamount to an acquittal, and that verdict has been provided by the Supreme Court of Canada. This case is really at an end." Perhaps not, however. It is a case that has been widely reported and has outraged the public.

This is a woman who went to great lengths to try to arrange her husband's untimely and violent death. She was charged in 2008 with counselling the commission of murder. On two separate occasions she paid $25,000 to two different men, for their services in enacting a murder on her behalf. The first agreement fell through, and the second agreement happened to be reached with an undercover RCMP officer.