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Souvannarath pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder last April, several months after Randall Steven Shepherd — a Halifax man described in court as the “cheerleader” of the shooting plot — was sentenced to a decade in jail. A third alleged conspirator, 19-year-old James Gamble, was found dead in his Halifax-area home a day before the planned attack.

Luke Craggs, Souvannarath’s defence attorney, said in an interview he is recommending a sentence of 12 to 14 years, with credit for time served, while he said the Crown is recommending 20 years to life in prison.

He said his client, now 26, decided to plead guilty after a failed bid to have some social media messages tossed out.

“Once the Facebook messages were ruled admissible, then there was no defence,” he said. “Once you see some of the conversations between her and Mr. Gamble, you’ll understand why they said that.”

Lawyers for the Crown have said there were “hundreds of thousands of pages” of evidence in the case.

The conspiracy can be traced back to December 2014, when Souvannarath and Gamble began an online relationship, exchanging explicit intimate photographs and a fascination with mass shootings, a statement of facts in the Shepherd case said.

The two began plotting an attack. They talked about weapons, ammunition, clothes, the number of dead, “whether they would taunt the victims,” and whether to upload pictures to the internet as the massacre unfolded, the document said.