A first-ever comprehensive Canadian registry of wrongful convictions shows 18 per cent of remedied cases were due to false guilty pleas and a third of all cases involved “imagined” crimes that never happened.
Like the U.S. registry, the Canadian registry does not attempt to measure “factual innocence” but records cases where the legal system admits its mistakes, often by admitting new evidence after a trial or a guilty plea.
Of the 83 documented cases, 28 — or 34 per cent — involved no crime actually taking place. In 15 — or 18 per cent — of cases, a false guilty plea was a factor. The findings nearly mirror those of the U.S. registry. The degree of “imagined crimes” cases — often due to “dirty thinking” by expert witnesses — is “staggering,” said Voss, who along with Stirling studied law at the University of Toronto, where Carling and Roach co-taught a course on wrongful convictions, and Roach continues to lead. on wrongful convictions due out this spring, hope the registry will not only inform lawyers, Crown attorneys and law students, but be taught in high schools.
Maria Shepherd was wrongfully convicted in a case where she entered a false guilty plea to manslaughter in the 1991 death of her 3-year-old stepdaughter on the advice of a lawyer, who advised that now-disgraced coroner Charles Smith’s evidence was solid and could land her more time in jail. She lauds the launch of the Canadian registry.
“It’s really nice to know that exonerees will be able to not only get recognized on this registry, but that somebody like me, a Canadian that’s been acquitted and looking for statistics, can actually go somewhere now to look at it and not feel like we’re alone because all of these years we really didn’t have something to fall back on that was reliable.”
The site features work by Moe Butterfly — a mixed Seneca, Two-Spirit artist currently residing on Susquehannock land —including the registry’s iceberg logo. There are also pages highlighting issues faced by Indigenous women and men, the former making up about 50 per cent of incarcerated females in Canada and the latter more than 30 per cent of all male prison admissions.
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