Lisa Neve eligible for immediate release

EDMONTON (CP) — Lisa Neve — who shed her infamous designation as a dangerous offender after a hard-fought five-year battle — will be freed from jail by week's end.

Corrections Canada officials concluded Wednesday that Neve has more than served her time for the offences which classed her with the country's most notorious criminals. Tim Krause, a spokesman for the federal prison authority, said Neve, 26, will be out on statutory release as soon as the paperwork is ready.

"Ms. Neve is immediately eligible for statutory release … she'll be released into the community as soon as release arrangements can be confirmed," he said.

In a written decision released Tuesday, Alberta's top court concluded that Neve's criminal record and behaviour did not warrant her being labelled a dangerous offender.

Neve, who was in a federal minimum-security jail in Saskatchewan, declined interviews Wednesday.

The former Edmonton prostitute has been in prison since May 27, 1993, when she was jailed for various offences, including robbery.

Neve lost her appeal of her robbery conviction and the Alberta Court of Appeal ordered a sentence of three years for that offence on Tuesday.

Corrections officials calculated that the sum of the sentence for all of her offences was 6* years.

In addition to robbery, she was serving time for two counts of uttering threats, failing to comply with a court order and aggravated assault.

Had Neve not been declared a dangerous offender in 1994, she would have been eligible for release in September 1997, said Krause.

Federal offenders are generally eligible for release after serving two-thirds of their sentence.

However, when she was designated a dangerous offender an indefinite jail sentence was imposed. Even with Tuesday's court decision, she won't have finished serving the sentence until Nov. 26, said Krause.

"She'll be supervised in the community right up until the time of her sentence completion," said Krause.

He said Neve will have to follow certain conditions as part of her release and could end up back in jail if she violates them.

Neve is expected to live with her mother and younger sister in Calgary.

Since the age of 15, Neve has amassed 22 criminal convictions, many of them involving weapons, threats and violence.

When she was declared a dangerous offender at the age of 21, Queen's Bench Justice Alec Murray said Neve had a "severe, anti-social personality disorder which manifests itself in evil, violent and sadistic thoughts."

The appeal court said Murray failed to take into account Neve prospects for rehabilitation and her troubling past.

At the age of 12, Neve became involved in prostitution, a seedy life that exposed her to drug and alcohol addictions and a subculture of violence.

The Crown moved to have Neve declared a dangerous offender after she slashed a prostitute's neck, threatened to kill an Edmonton lawyer and his children and took a fellow prisoner hostage at a young offenders centre in Calgary.

© The Canadian Press, 1999