Break-in was necessity, judge rules in acquittal
`Jim Nelson, 49, a homeless man who had been living in a tent in the forest outside Whistler since 2002, admitted to doing all that but argued in North Vancouver Provincial Court that he was forced to commit the crime in order to save himself from dying of cold and hunger.
His defence of necessity was an argument rarely heard in Canadian courts.
Provincial Court Judge Douglas Moss finally acquitted him, although he found Nelson’s tale of how he came to be there — as the result of a quest to reach spiritual perfection through fasting — “bizarre, to say the least.”‘
