A Justice in the B.C. Court of Appeal has dismissed an appeal from a man who killed a houseboat operator on Shuswap Lake nearly nine years ago.

Leon Reinbrecht had argued that the 46-month delay was unreasonable from when he was charged in December of 2011 to when he was found guilty in October of 2015.

However, today, Justice Daphne Smith ruled from Vancouver that more than a third of the delay was due to “discrete events” and deducted 16-and-a-half months from the total delay.

Of that, Smith says 10-and-a-half months was due to Reinbrecht’s Rowbotham application – the right to government-funded legal counsel – and she ruled another six-and-a-half months of the delay was due to a revised witness statement. That brought the total delay in the case to 29-and-a-half months, just under the ceiling of 30 months between being charged and convicted in B.C. Supreme Court.

Reinbrecht was found guilty of criminal negligence causing death after crashing into a house boat on Shuswap Lake, near Magna Bay, in July of 2010, which killed Ken Brown and injured eight other people, and was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison.