B.C.'s highest court has denied bail for a Richmond woman who slit the throat of her friend 20 years ago.
In November, a B.C. Supreme Court jury found Jean Ann James, 72, guilty of first-degree murder in the June 1992 slaying of Gladys Wakabayashi.
No charges were initially laid and the case remained cold for nearly 15 years until Vancouver police reviewed the file and launched a yearlong undercover operation targeting James.
In November 2008, the accused confessed to undercover cops that she was angry when she discovered that Wakabayashi was having an affair with her husband.
The Richmond woman said she drove to the victim's Shaughnessy home and used box cutters to slash her friend across the throat and tried to decapitate her. She also cut Wakabayashi on the legs in a bid to find out details of the infidelity.
James applied for bail pending her appeal of her murder conviction, arguing the circumstances surrounding the confession in the Mr. Big police undercover opera-tion were exceptional.
Her lawyer denied an allegation from an inmate where James is incarcerated that the killer had tried to obtain false ID to flee the country.
In reasons for judgment released Friday, the B.C.
Court of Appeal denied James' bail application.
Justice Ian Donald noted the Crown opposed bail on the basis that James posed a flight risk and that in any event, the strength of the appeal is outweighed by the public interest in enforcing the criminal sanction following the guilty verdict.
Noting that the allegations about the false ID were hearsay and that James denied them, the judge said that the quality of evidence of flight risk was unsatisfactory.
He said that the cruelty and horror of the killing make it an aggravated case of first-degree murder.
"The grounds of appeal must be commensurately strong to counter-balance the public interest in the enforcement of the penalty."
He said that the alleged deficiencies in the criminal investigation - including a lack of holdback evidence known only to the perpetra-tor - were fully addressed by the lawyers at trial and accurately summarized by the trial judge.
A member of the Wakabayashi family, who attended the trial proceedings and the appeal hearings, declined to comment outside court.
Read more: http: //www. theprovince.com.
