Court orders new trial for Melfort-area lovers convicted of planning to murder spouses
The convictions of two Melfort-area lovers for conspiring to murder their spouses have been set aside, and a new trial has been ordered.
Curtis Vey and Angela Nicholson were convicted in 2016 after a Prince Albert jury found they conspired to murder their spouses, Jim Taylor and Brigitte Vey. Both Vey and Nicholson were sentenced to three years in custody. After a lengthy process, however, Saskatchewan’s Court of Appeal set aside the lovers’ convictions due to two errors on the part of the trial judge.
In the court’s Aug. 8 decision, Justice Georgina Jackson said the errors came when Chief Justice Martel Popescul was issuing his instructions (or “charge”) to the jury, before the jury retired to consider its verdict. The first error, she wrote, came when the trial judge’s jury instructions failed to properly acknowledge arguments by the defence that Vey knew he was being recorded by his wife and merely pretended to participate in the conspiracy.
“In my respectful view,” Jackson wrote, “the trial judge did not adequately charge the jury with respect to the appellants’ defence regarding a genuine intention to carry out the common purpose. This grounds of appeal merits a new trial.”