In exposing how our courts and prisons work, The Globe has helped fix institutions and free innocent people. But sometimes, it has landed on the wrong side of justice and history
What was then the longest murder trial in Canadian history almost ended with the conviction of an innocent man. In April, 1985, police arrested Guy Paul Morin and charged him with the rape and murder of his nine-year-old neighbour, Christine Jessop, whose skeletal remains were found three months after she disappeared from her home in Queensville, Ont.
Decades later, The Globe took issue with a different aspect of prisoners’ rights, perhaps with less success. In the summer of 1935, officials granted early parole to notorious bank robber Norman “Red” Ryan – sometimes described as Canada’s Jesse James – who had served 11 years of a life sentence and claimed to be a changed man. The institutional injustice in this instance was that the prison had allegedly denied Ryan access to years’ worth of letters his wife sent to him.
Police arrested Dick in Hamilton and charged her with the murder of her estranged husband, whose torso was found by five children on the side of the Niagara Escarpment. Coverage of the Dick case pales in comparison with perhaps the most notorious Canadian crime story of the past half-century, which began in The Globe with a page-one article by Tim Appleby and Donn Downey on Feb. 18, 1993: “Man charged in girls’ slayings.” For many Canadians, it was the first time they read the name Paul Bernardo.
It wasn’t until May 18, 1995 – almost two years after Homolka was sentenced to 12 years in prison for manslaughter – that Bernardo’s trial formally began. For three months, The Globe’s coverage, led by Makin, contained some of the most chilling details ever printed in the paper. This became abundantly clear at The Globe in June, 2006, after one of the biggest anti-terrorism raids in Canadian history. Late on the night of Friday, June 2, heavily armed officers swept up a crew of mostly young men who, it was alleged, had grand and violent plans to do everything from blowing up the CBC’s Toronto office to beheading the prime minister. Eventually, the case would come to be known as the “Toronto 18,” after the number of suspects.
In a front-page column about the arrests titled “Ignoring the biggest elephant in the room,” Christie Blatchford argued that it was pure self-delusion to say the case had nothing to do with religion, when all the suspects were Muslim. “The accused men are mostly young and mostly bearded in the Taliban fashion,” she wrote. “They have first names like Mohamed, middle names like Mohamed and last names like Mohamed.
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