Woman thought bail conditions were ‘guidelines,’ not orders

Judge finds her gulity of the breaches, not guilty of shoplifting

A Grand Bank judge has found a woman guilty of breaching her bail conditions, despite her argument that she thought they were simply “guidelines.”

At the same time, provincial court Judge Harold Porter acquitted Lisa Morhart of a charge of shoplifting from the Marystown Shoppers Drug Mart, saying although he believed a police officer’s identification of Morhart as the thief was “probably right,” it wasn’t enough to convict.

Morhart had been arrested and charged with assault, uttering threats and mischief last July and was released by police on an undertaking with conditions to appear in court as scheduled, and prohibiting her from having contact with two specific people.

Two months later, one of those women told police Morhart had contacted her twice: once by visiting her home in an attempt to apologize and again by coming out of her own residence and telling the woman to get away from her property as she walked by.

“The accused has a slightly different version of events,” the judge noted in his decision. “She says that she did not agree with the bail conditions, but that she was given the choice to either sign the bail conditions and be released or remain in the police lockup until she could be brought before a judge.”

Morhart admitted she had been given the conditions by police, but said she thought they were “guidelines” and added she is not from Newfoundland and Labrador, Porter wrote.

Morhart testified she had visited the home of the woman she was ordered not to contact, telling her, “If I have done you wrong, let me make it up to you.” She hadn’t knocked on the woman’s door, she said, and had left when the woman told her that she wasn’t supposed to be there.

She testified she had seen the woman walking on the grass next to her front step two weeks later and opened her door to tell her to get off her lawn, then closed the door again.

The court saw video captured by Shoppers Drug Mart surveillance cameras in late September 2021, depicting a woman — with black curly hair and wearing sunglasses and a medical-type face mask — walking around the store, putting items in a basket and transferring them into a large black purse before leaving without paying. The theft was clear, the judge said; the issue was the thief’s identity.

An RCMP officer testified recognizing Morhart by her hairstyle and face outside the mask based on two prior contacts with her, one of them a week prior to the theft. When another officer went to Morhart’s home to arrest her, he saw a large black purse similar to the one in the video on her counter, but did not seize it.

Morhart denied being the thief and said she had never met the officer who had Ided her, but later told the court she recalled being pulled over by the Mountie a year earlier.

Porter found Morhart guilty of the two release-order breaches, saying she had admitted them in her testimony. He noted she had not been able to explain when asked on crossexamination how she could interpret the words “You must” in her release conditions as a “guideline.”

“As she said, she would have signed anything in order to get out of the police lockup,” the judge wrote.

He acquitted Morhart of the theft charge, saying it would be “unsafe and incorrect” to convict her in the circumstances.

“(The RCMP officer’s) evidence about how she recognized the accused in the surveillance video is compelling. I think she is probably right,” Porter wrote. “However, probability does not meet the standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt.”