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VANCOUVER — The attempt by undercover RCMP officers — encouraged and instructed from senior levels — to lure a pair of hapless Vancouver-area layabouts into a contrived plot to bomb the B.C. legislature buildings was a debacle. From start to finish.

That’s putting it mildly. B.C. Supreme Court Justice Catherine Bruce described it best.

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She pulled no punches while reading her long-awaited decision Friday in a downtown Vancouver courtroom. After listening to arguments made over the past 12 months, Bruce had to determine whether the Mounties had entrapped John Nuttall and his common-law wife, Amanda Korody.

Both were unemployed and dope-sick, living hand to mouth in a basement apartment they could barely afford and which they rarely left.

In her scathing hour-long delivery, a highlight-reel summary of her 210-page written judgment, Bruce denounced the RCMP’s actions and the undercover sting operation they hatched. “This was a clear case of police-manufactured crime,” the judge declared.