Ontario’s Crown prosecution office has told family members of two of Kenneth Law’s alleged victims that Mr. Law will plead guilty to assisting in the suicides of 14 people by selling them a toxic substance via his online business.
Mr. Law was charged in May 2023 with 14 counts of aiding suicide and 14 counts of murder.
In e-mails with the families sent Friday, the Crown indicates the guilty pleas will resolve the case. One family member said the Crown said prosecutors feel they cannot pursue murder charges because a recent Supreme Court ruling in an unrelated case made those charges untenable.
A second family member shared his email with The Globe and Mail. It does not say what will happen with the further 14-first-degree charges against Mr. Law. The Globe and Mail is not identifying the family members because they said they do not want to interfere in the judicial process.
Last December, the Supreme Court of Canada declined to clarify when murder charges can be laid against people who provoke apparent suicides.
The Supreme Court’s decision not to weigh in left an Ontario Court of Appeal decision on the matter untouched, a decision that Crown prosecutors in that case said “introduced significant limitations on the potential liability of those who engage in actions that assist a suicide.”
Kenneth Law, accused of selling deadly substances online, says rights violated in prison
When Mr. Law was arrested, authorities said the Mississauga man had mailed 1,200 packages of the toxic salts to people in more than 40 countries.
Mr. Law is to appear in Ontario Superior Court in Newmarket in a short virtual hearing Monday afternoon that will set the stage for subsequent appearances.
He has spent three years in pretrial custody, a consideration which could take years off his eventual sentence.
The 14 counts of aiding suicide that Mr. Law faces each carry a potential 14-year imprisonment term. (Convictions on multiple charges in Canada usually result in prison sentences that are served concurrently and not stacked.)
Ontario is the only jurisdiction that has ever charged Mr. Law with crimes, though police have alleged that he shipped 160 packages to several Canadian provinces. For three years, the Crown prosecution theory has been that Mr. Law was simultaneously responsible for the aiding suicide and committing murder in each of the 14 Ontario deaths across the province.
The British National Crime Agency told The Globe and Mail earlier this month that is has attributed 112 deaths to nearly 300 poison packages shipped to Britain from Canada.
“The National Crime Agency continues to investigate potential criminal offences linked to the deaths of individuals in the U.K. who purchased items to assist with suicide from Canada-based websites,” said spokesperson Natalie Stokes in an e-mail.
A spokesperson for the British Crown prosecution service, Jacob Thornbury, told The Globe in an e-mail that he could not comment on any facet of the British version of the Kenneth Law case.
On Friday, Peel Regional Police, the force that led detectives across the province in charging Mr. Law, would not respond to The Globe’s questions about the state of the prosecution. The Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General declined comment.
The family member who shared an e-mail with The Globe said he is deeply disappointed to hear word of a plea bargain where the murder charges are no longer being mentioned by government officials.
He said those charges are not going to happen.
This turn of events is devastating, he said, but could pave the way for other possible investigations – such as a public inquiry or coroner’s inquiry into how Mr. Law was able to ship hundreds of packages from Canada for years without anyone moving to stop him.
Leonardo Bedoya, whose 18-year-old daughter Jeshenia Bedoya-Lopez killed herself in their Aurora, Ont., home in September, 2022, with a package of poison allegedly bought from Mr. Law, said he was dismayed by the news of him pleading guilty to only the assisted-suicide charges.
“It’s a disgrace for the victims that, waiting so long, it won’t bring justice,” he told The Globe in an interview Friday evening.
Mr. Bedoya and his wife, Maria Lopez, had previously told The Globe that their daughter found the first waves of the pandemic isolating and arduous. But the couple said they were shocked when she took her own life on Sept. 10, 2022, after consuming the toxic salt their local police later told them she allegedly bought off one of Mr. Law’s online businesses.