Every year since Audra Armstrong’s death in a car crash in October 2007, her family has posted a memorial notice in their local paper with a message of love to their “yellow rose of Georgetown.”

After a trial in 2011, a jury convicted Shawn DeForest of dangerous driving causing the death of the 40-year-old mother of two, a passenger on a motorcycle caught in a pileup at the intersection.

But bizarrely, the same jury found DeForest not guilty on a second charge of dangerous driving causing bodily harm, related to the driver of motorcycle.

According to a recent Court of Appeal decision, the acquittal may have been a mistake by the jury.

The jury verdict sheet indicates that the jury meant to find DeForest guilty of the lesser included offence of dangerous driving — it was just never said in court.

“On count two, dangerous driving causing bodily harm, how do you find Shawn DeForest, guilty or not guilty?” the courtroom registrar asked the jury foreperson.

“Not guilty,” the foreperson answered.

However, since an acquittal was entered on the record, the three-judge panel found the only way to fix the irreconcilable verdicts was to acquit DeForest of dangerous driving causing death. He now stands acquitted on both charges.

Now, seven years after her death, Armstrong’s devastated family is struggling to understand how this could have happened.

“It’s totally dreadful,” said Armstrong’s mother, Ellen, from her home in Georgetown. “The fact that he got away with it ... it’s like she died for nothing. It makes me sick. We don’t have a justice system at all, we really don’t.”

No one raised the contradiction in the verdicts until DeForest and his co-accused appealed their convictions and sentences (he was sentenced to 18 months in jail) — and the Court of Appeal found that it was too late to find out what the jury really intended.

“One could reasonably go so far as to say that the jury probably intended to return the verdicts as recorded on the verdict sheet. That is not, however, what happened,” wrote Justice David Doherty on behalf of a panel of three Ontario Court of Appeal judges.

But no inquiry of the jury was carried out at the trial — and no inquiry could be carried out now, he wrote.

“The verdicts must be taken as announced by the jury in open court,” Doherty wrote. “I disregard, because I think I must as a matter of law, the distinct possibility that the real problem lies in the jury’s miscommunication of its intended verdict on count two. This court cannot go behind the verdict announced by the jury.”

He noted that the jury verdict sheet was not signed or dated, and that Superior Court Justice Anne Mullins did not instruct the jury to sign or date the verdict sheet. And while the judge told the jury she would examine the verdict sheet prior to the verdict being read, there is no indication from the record that she did.

“The whole thing is extremely unusual,” said DeForest’s trial lawyer, Michael Quigley, adding that in hindsight it would have been helpful for the jury to have been polled to make sure they agreed with the verdict as read.

The top court found it could not order a new trial on the dangerous driving charges because that would amount to double jeopardy. It could be argued that the jury intended to acquit DeForest because they doubted he was driving dangerously or even driving the car when the left turn causing the initial collision was made, the court found. DeForest always maintained it was his co-accused, Ashley Catton, who was driving.

However, DeForest and Catton were ordered to stand trial again on charges of obstructing police. DeForest did not respond to an interview request made through his lawyer.

Armstrong’s family places the blame on the presiding judge for failing to notice the discrepancy between the verdicts and failing to check the jury verdict sheet.

“As soon as it was read out, we couldn’t believe it,” recalled Armstrong’s older brother David. His wife said, “It’s impossible, there must be a mistake.”

“I thought we had one of the best justice systems in the world. And maybe we do. But this was a farce,” David Armstrong said.

“She was never afraid to try new things,” he said of his sister and friend. “She had the biggest, bravest heart of everyone I know.”

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Four weeks before she died, Armstrong had moved to a house in Georgetown with her two children, aged 10 and 12, to be closer to her parents.

“I miss her so much,” her mother, Ellen, said Tuesday, the memory of the sunny fall day when she and her husband, Jack, learned of the crash that is still vivid in her mind.

It still pains her that DeForest never showed any remorse during or after the trial.

“If he said he was sorry and apologized, that was all I wanted,” she said.