B.C.’s high court has ordered a new murder trial for one of two men acquitted April 25 in a double killing near Cranbrook.
Colin Raymond Correia and Sheldon Joseph Hunter were charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Leanne MacFarlane and partner Jeffrey Todd Taylor.
RCMP were called to a shooting at a rural residence off Highway 3/93 and found a woman dead and a man with severe injuries of which he later died. The date of the incident was May 29, 2010.
At the time, RCMP said it was a targeted incident but that the dead were not the intended targets.
Correia and Hunter were found not guilty by Justice Arne Silverman; however, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeal for B.C. unanimously overturned the decision regarding Correia on Oct. 24.
It was the Crown that appealed Correia’s acquittal.
Writing for the court, Justice Mary Saunders said the police's theory was that MacFarlane and Taylor were killed by mistake, and that the intended target was a previous tenant of the residence who was a member of a criminal rival gang.
That man, she said, was Doug Mahon.
Saunders said the gang rivalry had resulted in an earlier plan to kill Mahon.
“That plan had involved Mr. Correia (among others) engaging with a third person to carry out the alleged murder plot, but that person did not follow through on the plan,” Saunders said.
The judge said Correia was tried and convicted in 2013 of conspiracy to murder in relation to that plan and sentenced to 13 years’ incarceration.
“Mr. Correia had served a significant portion of his sentence for conspiracy to murder and was on parole when he was arrested on June 8, 2018 and charged with the two counts of murder now before us,” Saunders said.
She said Correia made inculpatory statements in a police interrogation.
“At trial, he was acquitted of the murders following a ruling that his inculpatory statements were inadmissible under the common law confessions rule because they were induced by a combination of police trickery and his diminished ability to think clearly that had contributed significantly towards his decision to speak to police,” Saunders said.
However, Saunders found Silverman erred in law in labelling the impugned police conduct as “police trickery” in two ways.
“The verdict of acquittal, therefore, cannot stand,” Saunders said. “I would set it aside and order a new trial.”
