Can you imagine?
by Kenneth Bagnell
One day, way back in the 1960s, a 16 year old boy, like so many bright teenagers do, embarked on a trip across Canada. In Saskatoon, the little group paused for sleep in a basement apartment, owned by a family whose son was to join the tour. In the meantime, a female nursing student, was found dead. Tragically, the son of the very family who accommodated them, did a dreadful thing: he pointed the finger at the young man, telling the police that he knew the killer, and thereby got a $2,000 reward. The victim of this dreadful act – which the police fell for – was named David Milgaard. What followed was horrible: at age 17, David Milgaard, who had no record whatsoever, was sentenced to life in prison. The only thing that could be worse would happen if Canada still used the death penalty.
Milgaard and his parents made many appeals but, to put it candidly, they were ignored, as many federal bureaucrats are too busy dealing with other federal bureaucrats. In this case that strategy was dreadful! Over 20 years passed and Milgaard was still behind the bars. Can you believe it?! Then, in about a year or so, a still highly regarded man, then a Liberal MP, took up the ignored and lonely cause. Lloyd Axworthy stood in his place in the Commons and rebuked the government for its do-nothingness. He got response. Kim Campbell, then the justice minister, pushed. Things got moving. In late 1997, after detailed forensic sampling, Milgaard was declared innocent.
Obviously I don’t know him but I am willing to bet he will never never be the same idealistic David Milgaard. Twenty years of his potential were left damaged. His boyish hopes, his life ambitions, his absent family relationship, and much, much more are fractured for him forever. And he was innocent! What a dreadful error and what indifferent stewardship by the so–called “authorities”. Sadly it’s not the first time nor — on what takes place now — will it be the last, when Canada’s police forces make major errors. Yes, I know, they are just human. But in my view they are often indifferent when they conclude the accused is guilty. Does it not worry you? It does many men I know, impeccably law abiding friends, who see too often questionable competence and dubious commitment in many police organizations, including as we have just seen, the revered RCMP. (You might see in detail what I mean by recent books on policing: That Lonely Section of Hell, and Why Law Enforcement resists Science. For meticulous proof read No One to Tell by Janet Merlo, on the macho culture of the RCMP. (I’ve read it.) I’m not thinking of affairs; I’m thinking, as Ms. Merlo is, looking back on her own RCMP career. She saw abuse in many forms, tool indelicate to mention.
Moreover, the awful Milgaard mistake is far from being the only one. Wrongful convictions make a long and heart breaking list of life-shattering errors. Here are others who experienced this absolutely dreadfully careless treatment. Once they were charged that was it; it was over for them. Except for one element; the network of barristers, legal aid, liberal solicitor, notaries others from legal backgrounds who work into the night, because they are certain that an inmate named, say Donald Marshall, is innocent. He was alleged late one night to have murdered a man named Seale. In time the RCMP reviewed his case and released him in 1982 and the court of appeal declared him innocent. Marshall became the subject of two films on the mistreatment. (He had served over 10 years and the films made him the symbol of how terrible a miscarriage of justice can be.)
The actual list is long, including these familiar names and many more: Guy Paul Morin, Gregory Parsons, Randy Druken and many more. The only modest benefit from all this is that the Canadian reformers mentioned above, are given greater impetus. Where? To seeing that error-ridden arrest and imprisonments are reduced and eliminated.
In part, criminologists have a few theories as to why these mistaken messes take place at all. One is simple errors made at the scene when police take the word of a passersby who too often makes a shallow and incorrect description of the man or woman they believed did the job. Or else, the police do not widen their close up vision: they are victims of t the proverbial tunnel vision, looking down the pipe instead if looking down the street. Yet another whimsy – one that should be obvious – is the taking of evidence from actual and current prison inmates who claim, roughly or rightly, that they are being misrepresented.
Nonetheless, despite all the injustice, there’s reason for fresh hope. It’s in an organization formed in the early 1990s, with its noble purpose in its very title: The Association for the Wrongly Convicted. We owe much gratitude to its founders and leaders, and especially to one man who was not even born Canadian; he was British born in a town called Orpington, near London, in 1949. In 1972, barely in his thirties, he was awarded a scholarship at McGill and in time became a criminal lawyer. Those who know him say it was simply natural that he chose to become a lawyer to those then very unfortunate young men, with little resources, who were charged with the most serious of crimes, murder. He served them all and they are were freed, names that echo in the sad aspects of history: Guy Paul Morin, David Milgaard, Robert Baltovich, Romeo Phillion. Those who know him say his success is not just due to his meticulous research and perspective, but his seemingly effortless presentation, understated, and thereby ever more effective. (I humbly confess I just do not understand where this man’s Companion of Canada is.)
We owe James Lockyer much more than seems to be realized. It’s past time to acknowledge it. In January, 2010, the erudite journalist Kirk Makin of the Globe & Mail did an essay on James Lockyer. I remembered it and went back to it. The words that called me back to Kirk’s fine essay were these: “As Mr. Lockyer stands off to one side, content and vastly relieved, his startled client – so recently reviled as the worst of the worst – struggles to describe what it is like to be welcomed back to the human race. It is a moment that Mr. Lockyer has lived a dozen times, personifying the success of a movement that constitutes the justice story of our era.”
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