“‘Without the police it would have been impossible for the defendants to carry out the pressure-cooker plan … The police decided they had to aggressively engineer and plan for Nuttall and Korody and make them think it was their own. The defendants were the foot soldiers but the undercover officer was the leader of the group.’ The judge noted that while the couple does adhere to extremist views that advocate violence to send political messages, police overstepped the bounds of their authority in their interactions with the pair.”

That may be. The police aren’t perfect. We can only hope that this judge is correct, and that Nuttall and Korody, having regained their freedom, don’t suddenly get smarter and decide to try to wage jihad again.

“Canada Day bomb plot couple freed after judge rules police entrapped them,” by Ashifa Kassam, Guardian, July 29, 2016:

A Canadian couple found guilty of planting homemade bombs outside a government building will walk free after a court in British Columbia ruled the pair was entrapped by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) into carrying out a “police-manufactured crime”.

John Nuttall, 41, and Amanda Korody, 33, were found guilty of terror charges last year after they planted inert pressure cooker bombs on the steps of British Columbia’s provincial legislature in 2013, ahead of Canada Day celebrations that drew thousands of revellers to the area.

The verdict was thrown out on Friday, after BC supreme court justice Catherine Bruce said the RCMP had manipulated the two converts to Islam into carrying out the plot.

“This was a clear case of police-manufactured crime,” Bruce wrote in her ruling. “The world has enough terrorists. We do not need the police to create more out of marginalized people.”

The judge pointed to the couple’s mental capacity to back the assertion that the crime had been instigated by police.

“The defendants also demonstrated that they were not very intelligent, gullible and quite naive and child-like,” she said of Nuttall and Korody, who were dependent on social assistance to get by as they struggled to overcome emotional and addiction issues.

The couple posed no imminent threat, she said. “To say they were unsophisticated is generous.” Both had been facing a maximum sentence of life in prison.

The judge sided with defence’s argument that the couple had been entrapped during a five-month undercover police operation involving some 240 police officers.

“Without the police it would have been impossible for the defendants to carry out the pressure-cooker plan … The police decided they had to aggressively engineer and plan for Nuttall and Korody and make them think it was their own,” said Bruce. “The defendants were the foot soldiers but the undercover officer was the leader of the group.”

The judge noted that while the couple does adhere to extremist views that advocate violence to send political messages, police overstepped the bounds of their authority in their interactions with the pair.

“The police engaged in a multifaceted and systematic manipulation of the defendants to induce them into committing a terrorist offence,” Bruce said….