Ontario’s Crown law office is appealing a jury’s acquittal of a Toronto woman who stabbed her boyfriend to death while he was driving, alleging the judge made numerous legal errors in the second-degree murder trial of Melissa Lewis.

“She’s very, very upset,” said her lawyer, Howard Goldkind. “It troubles me greatly. An intelligent jury found her not guilty after receiving the judge’s comprehensive legal instructions.”

Lewis, 26, was acquitted after admitting to plunging a knife into her longtime boyfriend’s neck while he was driving along a west-end Toronto street.

In the trial, her lawyer portrayed boyfriend Jermaine Gillespie as a “ticking time bomb” and Lewis as a long-suffering victim of his regular beatings. The trial heard that Gillespie, 25, was an abusive hothead who often carried a gun and was screaming “Ho’s pay me” to have sex when Lewis stabbed him.

Lewis argued self-defence. A jury acquitted her of second-degree murder after deliberating for less than 24 hours.

The Crown is asking the Ontario Court of Appeal to overturn the acquittal and order a new trial citing six grounds:

• Justice Robert Clark wrongly admitted bad character evidence about the deceased.

• He improperly restricted the Crown’s presentation of Lewis’s out of court statements contained in her journal.

• He erred in failing to instruct the jury on the limited use of the evidence of forensic psychiatrist Dr. Derek Pallandi.

• He erroneously instructed the jury that Lewis’ out-of-court statements to Pallandi were admissible for the truth of their contents.

• He erroneously included an instruction on “reflex” in the portion of his jury charge dealing with whether Lewis admitted an unlawful act.

• He erred in his instructions to the jury respecting the voluntariness aspect of the actus reus (physical act) of the offence.

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With files from Anita Li and Amy Dempsey