Canadian Judge Tosses Case After Finding Law Enforcement Entrapped Supposed Terrorists

Legal Issues

from the but-for-the-grace-of-untargeted,-overbudgeted-law-enforcement-agencies-go-we dept

It’s not just FBI agents playing with Home-Grown Terrorist™ Erector Sets. It’s also Canada’s top law enforcement agency, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. When there apparently aren’t enough actual terrorists to be found, agencies like these need to front the $40 at Wal-Mart for terrorist supplies, or dupe someone with an IQ of 51 into becoming the latest Indictment Du Jour.

Despite this, courts have largely gone along with the charade. It’s almost impossible for someone to successfully raise an entrapment defense, whether it’s a group of senior citizens who’ve been molded by undercover agents into an ad hoc terror unit or a bunch of easily-impressed thugs being hounded into stealing nonexistent drugs from fake stash houses.

Up in Canada, though, the law enforcement game may be played by the same rules, but one court isn’t willing to encourage the RCMP’s Build-a-Terrorist shenanigans.

A British Columbia couple convicted of terrorism charges have had their verdicts tossed out in a scathing court decision that flays the RCMP for its “egregious” conduct in manipulating naive suspects into carrying out a police-manufactured crime.

[…]

B.C. Supreme Court Justice Catherine Bruce said the Mounties used trickery, deceit and veiled threats to engineer the terrorist acts for which Nuttall and Korody were arrested on Canada Day three years ago.

The RCMP, like its US equivalent, only seeks the best of the best when attempting to turn citizens into terrorists. In this case, the RCMP found two easy marks — both heavily dependent on welfare checks and methadone — and convinced them they were going to be involved in a revolutionary pressure cooker bombing at some point in the future.

Judge Bruce noted that the two suspects contributed almost nothing to the RCMP’s plan. In fact, the judge stated that without the RCMP’s incredible amount of assistance, any plans to bomb anything likely would never have materialized. The indicted pair weren’t exactly self-starters, and the RCMP’s undercover agent basically had to act like a maniacal cult leader to get them to do anything at all.

She also condemned the behaviour of the primary undercover officer who, at the direction of the operation’s overseers, discouraged Nuttall and Korody from seeking outside spiritual guidance and convinced them he was a member of a powerful international terrorist group that would likely kill them if they failed to follow through.

“He was their leader and they were his disciples,” said Bruce, who stayed the proceedings, which threw out the convictions and allowed the couple to walk free after more than three years behind bars.

The government is appealing the decision and still firmly believes that the only party that did anything wrong here were the methadone users who hardly did anything. And for their minimal contributions to the RCMP’s master plan, the Crown is hoping to get a second chance at putting these two away for the rest of their lives.

Judge Bruce’s statement when tossing the charges should be repeated on this side of the border, where the FBI seems to expend a majority of its anti-terrorism time and energy pushing reluctant, inept, mostly-incapable people into becoming the bumbling, sacrificial figureheads of ISIS: West.

“The world has enough terrorists. We do not need the police to create more.”

There appears to be no shortage of legitimate (so to speak…) criminal activity for law enforcement to pursue and investigate. And yet, given the choice, they’d rather craft both criminals and criminal activity from the ground up, scoring easy goals against unguarded nets — making the world a little less safe while ensuring their budgets are never endangered.

Filed Under: canada, entrapment, own plot, rcmp, terrorism