Two more Newfoundlanders accused of serious crimes have taken their cases to the highest court in the country.
Lawyers for Kirk Keeping and Nicholas Villeneuve have filed applications for leave to appeal recent rulings in this province to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Keeping is accused of murdering his ex, Chantal John, and trying to kill her mother, in Conne River in early 2019.
(Kirk Keeping appears in the Court of Appeal by video from HMP. File photo.)
Since then the first-degree murder case has been fraught with delays as Keeping fights for a private lawyer to be paid for by the province.
The Newfoundland and Labrador Court of Appeal turned him down in May, leaving the Supreme Court of Canada as his last hope.
Meanwhile, Nicholas Villeneuve will have to wait about the same amount of time to learn the status of his appeal upalong.
The 25-year-old is accused of killing two people and seriously injuring two others in a head-on crash near Gander, also in 2019.
Villeneuve was charged with impaired driving causing death and bodily harm, but a judge ruled his rights were violated by police in the immediate aftermath, and he was acquitted. But that was overturned by the province’s Court of Appeal, which ordered a new trial in the case.
Villeneuve wants to appeal that decision, and have the original acquittals reinstated.
It usually takes the Supreme Court of Canada a couple of months to review a case and decide if they’ll hear the appeal.
