VICTORIA – Attorney-General Mike de Jong says the province will consider an appeal of a B.C. Supreme Court ruling that threw out the case against two Kootenay community leaders accused of having multiple wives.

Lawyers for Winston Blackmore and James Oler asked the court to throw out a single count of polygamy laid against each of them earlier this year, and on Wednesday a judge agreed. Former attorney-general Wally Oppal did not have authority to appoint a second special prosecutor to the decades-long case after the first one declined to proceed, Justice Sunni Stromberg-Stein ruled.

Oppal championed the use of a little-used section of the Criminal Code to prosecute the two men, rival leaders of a breakaway fundamentalist sect of the Mormon church who led a community in Bountiful. Blackmore was charged with having 19 wives, and Oler three.

"The attorney of the day, Mr. Oppal, was confronted by an important and difficult decision, and that was to try and get a matter that has lingered for some time before the courts," de Jong said Wednesday. "The Supreme Court of British Columbia has issued a ruling that impedes, or obviously constrains the ability to do that on the basis of the reasons that the justice has said. We're going to study those reasons and then make a decision."

De Jong would not comment on the defence lawyers' contention that Oppal was "special prosecutor shopping" to find a lawyer willing to lay charges. An earlier prosecutor looked at the evidence collected by the RCMP in a series of investigations in the past two decades, and recommended that B.C. test the validity of the polygamy law first with a reference case to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The law has seldom been used, and never since the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was adopted.

At issue is whether the polygamy law would withstand a Charter of Rights challenge based on freedom of religion. The 1,000 residents of Bountiful are all members of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, which split with the mainstream Mormon church a century ago rather than renounce multiple marriage.

The B.C. community was established near the U.S. border in the 1940s, but didn't come to public attention until the 1980s. Similar communities exist in the U.S., particularly in Utah where the Mormon church was founded.