Alberta watchdog will investigate N.S. police handling of wrongful murder conviction

HALIFAX – The daughter of a Nova Scotia man who was wrongfully convicted of murder and spent 17 years in prison says she’s glad a police watchdog has at long last agreed to investigate whether officers committed a crime during their investigation.

Glen Assoun was convicted for the murder of his ex-girlfriend Brenda Way in 1999 and was acquitted in 2019. He died on June 14, 2023.

His daughter Amanda Huckle said she was relieved to learn that after years of waiting for an investigation, Alberta’s police oversight agency will begin examining whether police broke the law when they investigated Way’s murder. The RCMP has admitted that it was wrong to destroy evidence about other suspects in the case, which remains unsolved.

“Now we can put one foot in front of the other. My family has at least a little bit of hope now that my dad’s going to receive some justice,” Huckle said in an interview Thursday.

“We think about this every day … it’s like our wounds are being held open, and believe me, they’re painful wounds,” she added.

The Nova Scotia government in 2020 asked the province’s police oversight body begin a formal probe into Assoun’s case. In March 2021, the watchdog announced that to ensure transparency its counterpart in British Columbia had agreed to take on the investigation. But the B.C. agency dropped the case in 2023, saying its officers were too busy.

In a news release Thursday, the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team says its members have the capacity to conduct the investigation. 

Assoun’s daughter said her family has had no closure in the years since her father’s acquittal, adding that she hopes the probe will determine who was responsible for the miscarriage of justice that led to her father spending 17 years in prison. 

“Nobody’s been held accountable, we have no closure. My father, he’s no longer with us anymore, he has no rest,” she said. 

Huckle, who is a police constable in Nova Scotia, said she thinks the probe will “absolutely” find there was police wrongdoing in Assoun’s case. 

“It even goes back to the initial investigation of my dad as a suspect. There was tunnel vision there … they took an idea and they formulated the evidence around that to make it believable,” she said. 

In 2014, Assoun was released from prison on strict conditions after the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted persuaded the federal Justice Department to conduct a preliminary assessment of his case. The RCMP had chosen not to disclose an investigator’s theories about other suspects in the murder case, and the Mounties had destroyed most of this potential evidence, the assessment found.

The Mounties later issued a statement saying the files were deleted for “quality control purposes,” but the actions were “contrary to policy and shouldn’t have happened.”

In March 2019, a Nova Scotia Supreme Court decision overturned Assoun’s conviction, and he later agreed to an undisclosed compensation deal with the Nova Scotia and federal governments in March 2021.

Nova Scotia Justice Minister and Attorney General Becky Druhan said in an email she’s pleased that Nova Scotia’s watchdog has reached this agreement with their Alberta counterpart to probe “whether any police officer committed a criminal offence” in Assoun’s investigation and conviction. 

“The ASIRT (Alberta Serious Incident Response Team) will lead an extensive independent investigation, and this work will require time,” Druhan said in the statement. 

Huckle said she was told Wednesday an agreement with the Alberta watchdog had been reached and the investigation would soon be underway. She was not given any indication of how long this process will take. 

“As long as it’s done thoroughly, frankly, I don’t care how long it takes,” she said. 

“My dad’s case is very complex and lengthy, so there’s lots to go through. Lots of stones to be turned. A lot of people to speak with, if they’re still here. Some of them, I’m sure, have passed on by now,” Huckle added. 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 16, 2025. 

Note to readers:This is a corrected story. A previous version misspelled the family name of Amanda Huckle.