Chapter 9: Wrongful Convictions Flashcards
What is the criminal conviction review process?
Criminal Code Section 696.1 –> conviction review application. An application for ministerial review on the grounds of miscarriage of justice may be made to the Minister of Justice by or on behalf of a person who has been convicted of an offence under an Act of Parliament or a regulation made under an Act of Parliament or has been found to be a dangerous offender or a long-term offender under Part XXIV and whose rights of judicial review or appeal with respect to the conviction or finding have been exhausted.
What does the Minister of Justice do?
- New trial/hearing; refer to Provincial Appeal Court; refer to specific questions to Court of Appeal for opinion.
What is Innocence Canada?
- a non-profit organization in Canada dedicated to identifying, advocating for, and exonerating individuals convicted of a crime that they did not commit and to preventing such injustices in the future through education and reform.
What are the limitations/criticisms of ministerial review?
- not open to anyone who plead guilty
- Minister of justice is still a member of the justice system (not really an independent review)
How did Innocence Canada happen?
the Guy Paul case put it on the map.
deals mostly with serious crimes (homicide)
generally used for people who can’t afford their own legal team or investigators. Reviewing over 80 cases of claims of innocence, actively pursuing over 40 cases of wrongful convictions. Mostly wrongful convictions come from Ontario, British Columbia, Saskatchewan. Over 96% of cases are for murder cases (rest still serious offences like sexual)
What are causes for wrongful convictions?
- inaccurate eyewitness identification/biased procedures
- Overzealous or unethical police/prosecutors
- Overreliance on jailhouse informants and snitches
- Tunnel vision and confirmation bias by investigators
- Incompetent/ineffective defense lawyers
- judges who show bias towards favoring prosecution in rulings
- poor/unreliable scientific evidence
- perjury by witnesses, jailhouse informants, and forensic examiners
- junk science
- sloppy laboratory procedures
- pressure to solve high-profile cases
What does the legal system think about the innocence project?
Smith, Zalman, & Kiger (2011) –> surveyed 467 Judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and police:
- All knowledge errors/inaccuracies in the system
- Police and prosecutors estimated low errors rates, whereas judges and defense lawyers were more inclined to acknowledge that some degree of error occurs.
- Most police, prosecutors, and judges (70-90%) were of the opinion that wrongful convictions do not occur with sufficient frequency to warrant changes in the justice system.
- Most defense lawyers (91.6%) called for procedural change.
Who is Glen Assoun?
- Nova Scotia
- convicted of murdering his girlfriend, Brenda Lee Way in 1995
- 17 years in prison
- maintained his innocence
- exonerated in 2019
Suspected murderer –> Michael McGray
Who is David Milgaard?
- convicted in 1969 of murder in Saskatchewan and sentenced to life in prison
- Appeals failed, but his mother advocated for years on his behalf
- 1991, Justice Minister directed Supreme Court of Canada to review conviction:
- 1992 - conviction set aside
- 1997 - exonerated by DNA evidence
- 1999 - awarded $10 million for wrongful conviction
Who is Steven Truscott?
- 1959 - age 14, sentenced to be hanged for killing a schoolmate in Ontario
- commuted to life imprisonment a few months later
- 1969 - paroled
- 2007 - conviction overturned
- 2008 - awarded $6.5 million in compensation
What is the Norfolk Four
- Victim:
- Michelle Moore-Bosko
- Raped and murdered in summer of 1997 in Virginia
- Billy Bosko finds his wife’s body after returning home from duty at sea on a USS Naval ship
- Daniel Williams and his wife are first once scene after Billy calls for help
- Tamika Taylor - raises suspicions about Williams and another individual.
- made him think he might of done it and forgot, sleepwalked, blacked out, and maybe did do it.
Who was the actual perpetrator of Michelle Moore-Bosko?
- Omar Ballard
- his DNA was later found on her body
- Pardoned in 2009
