(JCCF) — The Justice Centre has announced that Crown Prosecutors have agreed to withdraw all but one of the Public Health Act offences that Pastor James Coates has been charged with and expects he will be released from jail in the coming days, without any conditions, pending his May 3-5 trial in Provincial Court.
The Justice Centre will defend Pastor Coates on one remaining charge of violating an Order of the Chief Medical Officer of Health by challenging the lawfulness of the public health order that he is charged with violating.
The Pastor of Grace Life Church near Edmonton has been incarcerated in the Edmonton Remand Centre for a month, since February 16. It is expected that Pastor Coates could be released from jail as early as Friday, March 19.
Grace Life is a church of nearly 400 congregants who have exercised their Charter rights and freedoms normally since July of 2020, including their freedoms of assembly, association, expression, religion and conscience. Not one congregant has been lost to Covid, but, sadly, a congregant was lost to the Alberta Government lockdown in the first week of February when he died prematurely because he couldn’t get the cancer treatment he needed due to government lockdown restrictions.
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