There is a slim chance this week's Supreme Court of Canada ruling on Mr. Big stings could help a Prince George man convicted of second-degree murder, says a law professor.
On Thursday, the SCOC upheld the overturned conviction of a Newfoundland man, Nelson Hart, who had been convicted of drowning his twin daughters.
Hart had been the target of a Mr. Big sting, in which police pretending to be high-ranking criminals extracted a confession from him.
The SCOC ruled the strategy can still be used, but it placed severe restrictions on its admissibility and police tactics that can be deployed in the process.
A Mr. Big sting was also central to the case against Denis Florian Ratte, who was found guilty in November 2010 of murdering his wife, Wendy Ann Twiss Ratte, who disappeared from Prince George in 1997.
He was sentenced to 15 years in prison before eligibility for parole. The verdict was upheld by the B.C. Appeals Court in August 2013 and in May 2013, the SCOC rejected an application from Ratte for leave to appeal.
"If somebody has gone all the ladder of appeals up to the Supreme Court of Canada, then I think they're going to be out of luck," Micah Rankin, who teaches law at Thompson Rivers University, said Friday.
"The only qualification I would say on that is if you applied for leave and your leave to appeal is dismissed, then in that scenario they might be able to apply for reconsideration of their leave application, which almost never succeeds but is not an impossible scenario."
Police mounted the sting on Ratte in 2007 and got him to tell them details about the killing. After his arrest, Ratte confessed, but recanted at trial.
Rankin applauded the SCOC's ruling on the Hart case.
"I think this is a good development in the law and I think there was a real problem with the Mr. Big operations," Rankin said. "I'm not sure this is going to fully address those problems but it certainly is a much better situation than existed before."
