Nicola Puddicombe sat quietly in the prisoner’s box inside a downtown Toronto courtroom as her lawyers argued she is a changed woman who has come to accept accountability for conspiring to kill her boyfriend Dennis Hoy 19 years ago.

In 2009, Puddicombe was found guilty of the first-degree murder of Hoy, after Crown prosecutors argued she and her ex-girlfriend Ashleigh Pechaluk orchestrated the murder so they could be together and cash in on Hoy’s quarter-million dollar life insurance policy.

Puddicombe is now the subject of a faint hope hearing in which a jury of her peers must decide whether she should be eligible for parole immediately, which would be six-and-a-half years before she is eligible to apply for parole in May 2032.

The faint hope clause of the Criminal Code of Canada allow

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