A Surrey woman has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail for conspiring to have her former boss killed.
Amarjit Lally, 47, was charged in April 2010 with counseling to commit an indictable offence for trying to arrange a hit on Gurcharan Singh Brar, her boss at the furniture store where she worked. Lally pleaded guilty to the charge, though the murder was never carried out.
She was sentenced in Surrey Provincial Court on Monday (Feb. 20).
During the trial, the court heard Lally had borrowed money from Brar and she was afraid he'd tell her husband about the loan. Defence lawyer Russ Chamberlain claimed her husband was an alcoholic who abused her mentally and physically and that her home life would get worse if he was told about the debt.
It was revealed Lally had met with two undercover police officers – who she thought were contract killers – and arranged to run drugs across the U.S. border in exchange for Brar's murder.
Lally admitted last month she had met with the men in a grocery store parking lot on Scott Road, but claimed she did not hire them.
"I said to them, I did not want them to do anything, but if anything changed, I'd call them," Lally testified through an interpreter.
Chamberlain painted Lally as a desperate victim, incapable of sound judgment. He argued the mother of two teens shouldn't spend any time behind bars and suggested two years house arrest followed by three years probation.
Crown prosecutors argued Lally should spend at least five years in prison as she was planning to have someone murdered.
Lally's sentence also includes a lifetime firearms ban.
She was also initially charged with arranging to have her mother-in-law killed, but that charge was stayed.