Canada’s wrongfully convicted are people who were driven to make false confessions. People who were convicted based on flawed forensics. People who were named by witnesses who got it wrong. A new book uncovers why:
The Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions lists 83 names. They are people who were driven to make false confessions. People who were convicted based on flawed forensics. People who were named by witnesses who got it wrong. The registry, posted online in February, was co-created by Kent Roach, a law professor at the University of Toronto who has fought to right miscarriages of justice for over three decades. “These names are the tip of an iceberg whose real size we don’t know,” he says.
In Marshall’s case, whatever could have gone wrong did go wrong. Investigative tunnel vision was intense from the start. Marshall was an Indigenous youth with a history of liquor violations, and police were certain of his guilt. Never mind that he was cut up—investigators said his injuries must have been self-inflicted and disregarded exonerating evidence.
It’s a giant step forward, Roach says, but the bill has yet to pass. In the meantime, he’s keeping a wary eye on the contours of that new commission—how effective, fast-moving and independent it will be. That’s why his book delves into the gritty and appalling details of the registry’s cases. Real change won’t occur, Roach believes, until Canadians know the stories of the people who were wronged.
In 1999, Gladue became the focus of a landmark Supreme Court case—Canada’s first attempt to grapple with the over-incarceration of Indigenous people. “The Gladue case haunts me,” says Roach, who worked with Aboriginal Legal Services and later came to believe Gladue had a valid self-defence claim never asserted. He realized that the majority of criminal cases are resolved by guilty pleas, often by women and mothers of young children who choose the deal as the lesser of two evils.
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