The man convicted in a bombing death is appealing his conviction.
Brian Andrew Malley, 57, of Innisfail was convicted by a jury on Feb. 24 of first-degree murder in the bombing death of Victoria Shachtay.
His appeal of the conviction was filed on March 6 at the Calgary Court of Appeals.
It will be heard on May 12 during the court’s scheduled sitting to speak to criminal matters.
Shachtay was killed on Nov. 25, 2011, when she opened a Christmas gift left on the doorstep of her Innisfail home. That gift disguised a pipe bomb, which detonated when the 23-year-old quadriplegic single mother opened it.
After a five-week trial in Red Deer Court of Queen’s Bench, a jury of eight women and four men deliberated for six hours before convicting Malley.
Malley was sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility for parole for 25 years.
At the conclusion of the trial, Crown prosecutor Anders Quist said he expected an appeal to be filed.
During the trial, Quist said the motive for the bombing was financial. Shachtay had invested $575,000 with Malley, money she had received as a settlement from the 2004 crash that left her paralyzed from the neck down. From 2007 to 2011, Shachtay had an investment account that Malley managed.
By April 2011, the money was gone. Much of it was lost in 2008 when the shares of the largest portion of the investment (92 per cent) were cut in half due to market pressures.
From 2007 to Oct. 15, 2011, Malley made payments to Shachtay totalling $44,000 from his personal accounts. Quist said Malley killed Shachtay to cut his losses.
Malley’s defence counsel Bob Aloneissi called the conviction a miscarriage of justice, comparing it to the convictions of David Milgaard and Guy Paul Morin. Both were convicted of murder, but were later acquitted or exonerated.
“Malley’s credentials are that he was accused of a horrific murder, and he suffered the injustice of a tunnel vision investigation which skewed the facts to fit their suspect,” Aloneissi wrote in an email to the Advocate.