Five thousand Canadian dollars in cash stays in custody. A laptop holding a Bitcoin wallet goes home. That split, handed down on Tuesday in a Halifax courtroom, is the practical result of the Sandeson bitcoin wallet ruling. The reasoning behind it is more interesting than the headline.

The decision came from Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice John Bodurtha, who directed that the laptop go back to relatives of William Sandeson. Sandeson is serving a life term for the 2015 killing of fellow student Taylor Samson. Decrypt reported, citing Global News, that Sandeson joined the hearing by video link. He had filed a motion in April seeking personal belongings taken from his apartment after his 2015 arrest.

Why the Crown lost on the wallet

The judge's logic turned on proof. According to the report, Bodurtha found that prosecutors had not shown the Bitcoin was used in the drug transaction, was proceeds of crime, or was tainted by criminality in any other way. He called the idea that it might have figured in the deal hypothetical.

That's a narrow finding. It doesn't declare the wallet clean. The Crown carried the burden and brought no evidence tying those coins to the killing. A theory that a digital asset could have been part of a drug purchase is a long way from a trail showing it was.

Cash got different treatment. The judge ruled that roughly C$5,000 (about US$3,600) found in the apartment after the murder counts as offence-related property. It won't be returned.

The contrast is instructive. Paper money turned up in the apartment of a man who had just taken C$40,000 in drug money, and the court was willing to connect the dots. A wallet on a laptop offered no equivalent link on the record the Crown presented. Crypto's reputation for opacity cuts both ways in court: if you can't show where the coins came from or went, you may not be able to forfeit them either.

What the wallet might be worth

Nobody has publicly said how much Bitcoin is in it. Global News, per Decrypt, didn't report a quantity, and the valuations on offer sit far apart.

Sandeson has put the value at C$8,000 to C$10,000, or roughly US$5,800 to $7,200. A lawyer acting for Samson's family, who are pursuing their own wrongful death claim in which the wallet has figured prominently, has said it could now exceed C$200,000, around US$144,000.

That's a gap of about twenty-five to one. Part of it may come from when each side priced the holding, since Bitcoin has moved enormously since 2015. Part may come from what each side believes is on the device. Bitcoin traded near $78,400 on Wednesday, down almost 3% on the day, so a stale quote would give a very different number than a current one. My own back-of-envelope math, and it's only that, suggests the two camps may be imagining wallets that differ by a factor of twenty or more in coin count, never mind price. Neither side has shown its work publicly.

I'd treat both figures as advocacy until someone opens the wallet in front of a neutral party. Expect the number to stay fuzzy until then.

The case behind the laptop

The underlying crime is grim and, by now, well documented in court. On August 15, 2015, Samson, 22, went to Sandeson's apartment. Sandeson was 23 and weeks from beginning medical school at Dalhousie University. Prosecutors at his 2023 trial said the meeting was meant to be a cannabis sale, with Sandeson agreeing to pay C$40,000.

Sandeson shot Samson and held on to both the product and the cash. He later admitted to getting rid of the body in a river that empties into the Bay of Fundy. Samson's remains have never been found.

The legal path since has been long. A first-degree murder conviction came in 2017, and an appeals court overturned it in 2020. At the second trial in 2023, Sandeson acknowledged the shooting but said it was self-defense. The jury didn't accept that and settled on second-degree murder, a verdict that brings mandatory life imprisonment. He is serving that term in Quebec and becomes eligible for parole in 2030.

Where the Sandeson bitcoin wallet fight goes next

The ruling returns the laptop to Sandeson's family. It doesn't settle who ultimately benefits from what's on it. The wrongful death suit brought by Samson's family is a civil matter with a lower standard of proof than a criminal forfeiture, and the wallet has already been a focus there. A civil court could, in principle, reach assets that a criminal court declined to forfeit. Whether that happens, and whether the family can freeze or claim the coins before they move, is unanswered in the public record.

That last point deserves attention. A seized hard drive is one thing. A wallet in a family's hands is another, because whoever holds the keys can move the funds in minutes. I'd expect lawyers on the civil side to be thinking hard about preservation orders right now. That's speculation on my part, and nobody has announced anything of the kind.

Three questions are worth tracking:

  • Will the Crown appeal? Nothing in the public account says it will. The finding turns on evidence, which makes it harder to challenge than a pure legal error.
  • Does the civil case move to secure the assets? The lawyer's C$200,000 estimate suggests the family sees real value at stake.
  • What's actually in the wallet? Until a coin count is on the record, the C$8,000 and C$200,000 claims are just numbers traded across a courtroom.

For anyone holding crypto, the broader lesson is plain enough. Courts in Canada, as elsewhere, will demand a connection between a digital asset and a crime before they take it, the same as they would for a car or a bank balance. Suspicion that coins might have been involved isn't enough. For law enforcement, the message runs the other way: if the wallet matters, trace it while the case is live, because the evidentiary bar doesn't loosen just because the asset is exotic.