Permutations II(improve)

Given a collection of numbers that might contain duplicates, return all possible unique permutations.

For example,
[1,1,2] have the following unique permutations:
[1,1,2], [1,2,1], and [2,1,1].

Why can not I think of this way...

class Solution:
    # @param num, a list of integer
    # @return a list of lists of integers
    def permuteUnique(self, num):
        
        length = len(num)
        
        if length == 0:
            return []
        elif length == 1:
            return [num]
        
        num.sort()
        
        prev_num = None
        result = []
        
        for index in range(length):
            
            if num[index] == prev_num:
                continue
            else:
                prev_num = num[index] 
                
            for perm in self.permuteUnique(num[0 : index] + num[index+1 :]):
                result.append([num[index]] + perm)
                
        return result