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| Nicole Doucet Ryan, a high school teacher in southwestern Nova Scotia, was arrested in March 2008 and charged with counselling an undercover police officer to kill her husband, Michael Ryan. |
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Canada stayed proceedings against Nicole Doucet, who sought to hire at least one 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.”
But did they lose their vision, or were they in fact honouring the prevailing — which is to say, feminist — vision of Canadian society? By this I mean the received wisdom that women’s historic disadvantages justify present-day special treatment. (more...)
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