Vincentian woman to be deported from Canada for helping a killer flee from police

A Vincentian woman convicted for helping a Canadian killer flee from police in 2014 will be deported back to St Vincent and the Grenadines, where she has not lived since she was nine years old.

CBCNews reported on Wednesday that last year, a judge ruled that Debra Jane Spencer {{more}}was in the room when her then-boyfriend, Bradford Eugene Beals, killed David William Rose in a rooming house on Inglis Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Beals pleaded guilty earlier this year to manslaughter and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Spencer had pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact. She was sentenced to two years in prison and did not file an appeal in the 25-day window that followed. The conviction breached her immigration status.

Spencer was born in 1984 and moved to Canada in 1993 with an adoptive parent. According to court documents, she graduated from a Yarmouth high school in Nova Scotia and later moved to Halifax.

On Oct. 5, 2015, she filed a request with the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal to extend the time to appeal her sentence because she said “during the criminal proceeding, she was unaware of the prospect of deportation.”

In a decision released on Wednesday, Justice Joel Fichaud denied Spencer’s request. To have it granted, he said she would need to persuade the court to reduce her sentence to six months or less.

“In Ms Spencer’s case, a reduction from two years to six months would drop her sentence far below the range of fit sentences for being an accessory to murder,” wrote Fichaud.

“There is no possibility that a panel of this court would order that reduction.”