Terry Roy Levy has had his second-degree murder conviction overturned after writing a lengthy letter to the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal, arguing he killed his daughter’s boyfriend in an act of self-defence.
Levy also insisted the jury was not given proper instructions by the trial judge to consider the self-defence argument.
In a decision released Wednesday, a panel of three judges of the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal agreed with Levy, quashed his conviction and ordered a new trial on a charge of second-degree murder.
Terry Green, 37, was found shot dead July 8, 2014 in a meadow on the tiny and sparsely populated Little Tancook Island in Mahone Bay.
Levy was 60 at the time of the killing, and was originally charged with first-degree murder.
He was found guilty of second-degree murder last year and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 11 and-a-half years.
After Green was shot, Levy calmly waited for police to arrive and gave several statements to investigators, even re-enacting the incident for video cameras.
Green was Levy’s daughter’s boyfriend and worked for her contracting company.
He had a history of threatening and physically assaulting the older man, facts that came out during Levy’s 2015 trial.
The day Green was shot began with an altercation in Levy’s kitchen. Green was upset that Levy’s grandson had not shown up for work at his mother’s company.
He confronted the boy and when Levy entered the room, Green grabbed him by the neck with such force that Levy defecated.
Some time after Green left the Levy home that morning, Levy called his daughter to find out why Green was upset. That call did not end well and Levy said he believed Green was on his way back to the family home.
He armed himself with a shotgun and waited outside testifying to the court that he “wasn’t going to take another beating.”
In the Court of Appeal’s majority decision, Justice Duncan Beveridge writes the Crown did not meet the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Levy intended to kill Green and that self-defence was not properly explained to the jury.
“Given the flexible direction mandated by the new self-defence provisions on whether an act of an accused was reasonable in all of the circumstances, there was evidence on the record upon which a reasonable jury, properly instructed, could acquit.”
The Court of Appeal judges also said the trial judge made a serious legal error by repeatedly telling the jury that the “…intent for murder was established if the Crown proved that the appellant meant to cause death or meant to cause bodily harm he knew was likely to cause death or was reckless whether death ensued.”
The appeal court called this a “repeated misdirection” which confused the jury on the issue of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
The court found that jury was not properly instructed on the intent required to murder.
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