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Compensation for Wrongful Convictions in Canada

Author: Myles Frederick McLellan

Publisher: Eliva Press

Published: 2021-01-29

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 9789975347587

The plight of the wrongly convicted is gaining prominence with the growing awareness of the prodigious harms to innocent persons at the hands of the criminal justice system. Most of the attention, both scholarly and legislatively, has been focused on the causes of wrongful convictions and the need to free the innocent. What needs to now be addressed more comprehensively is the issue of how to provide redress to those persons whose lives have been inexorably damaged and how to best compensate them in their efforts to rebuild a life. The available remedies in Canada to pursue compensation include civil litigation for malicious prosecution, negligent investigation, a Charter breach and the highly politicized exercise of discretion by a government to make a payment without acknowledging liability. Except for the very few, none of these remedies are very helpful. Liberal democracies like Canada are honour bound if not constitutionally mandated to provide for innocence compensation far beyond the onerous and cost prohibitive pursuit of litigation against the State and the current highly secretive and inadequate executive remedy requiring an elusive exercise of mercy. About the Author: Dr. Myles Frederick McLellan (LL.B (J.D); LL.M (Osgoode); Ph.D. (Anglia Ruskin - Law) is a Professor of Law and Justice at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada. The focus of his research, writing and teaching is criminal justice. He is the Director and Founder of the Innocence Compensation Project and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Wrongful Conviction Law Review. He is on the Policy Review Committee of the Canadian Criminal Justice Association. He has also been a Commissioner of Police and a Federal Crown Counsel.

Miscarriages of Justice in Canada

Author: Kathryn M. Campbell

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2018-06-12

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 1487514573

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Innocent people are regularly convicted of crimes they did not commit. A number of systemic factors have been found to contribute to wrongful convictions, including eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, informant testimony, official misconduct, and faulty forensic evidence. In Miscarriages of Justice in Canada, Kathryn M. Campbell offers an extensive overview of wrongful convictions, bringing together current sociological, criminological, and legal research, as well as current case-law examples. For the first time, information on all known and suspected cases of wrongful conviction in Canada is included and interspersed with discussions of how wrongful convictions happen, how existing remedies to rectify them are inadequate, and how those who have been victimized by these errors are rarely compensated. Campbell reveals that the causes of wrongful convictions are, in fact, avoidable, and that those in the criminal justice system must exercise greater vigilance and openness to the possibility of error if the problem of wrongful conviction is to be resolved.

Justice Miscarried

Author: Hélèna Katz

Publisher: Dundurn

Published: 2011-06-14

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1554888743

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Looks at judicial error and wrongful conviction in Canada, including the cases of David Milgaard, Donald Marshall, Guy Paul Morin, and Clayton Johnson.

Wrongfully Convicted

Author: Kent Roach

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2023-04-18

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1668023687

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A top legal scholar explains Canada’s national tragedy of wrongful convictions, how anyone could be caught up in them, and what we can do to safeguard justice. Canada’s legal system has a serious problem: a significant but unknown number of people have been convicted for crimes they didn’t commit. There are famous cases of wrongful convictions, such as David Milgaard and Donald Marshall Jr., where the system convicted the wrong person for murder. But there are lesser-known cases: people who feel they have no option but to plead guilty, and people convicted of crimes that were imagined by experts or the police that never, in fact, happened. Kent Roach, cofounder of the Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions, award-winning author, and law professor, has dedicated his illustrious career to documenting flaws in our justice system. His work reveals that the burden of wrongful convictions falls disproportionately on the disadvantaged, including Indigenous and racialized people, those with cognitive issues, single mothers, and the poor. Wrongfully Convicted raises awareness about wrongful convictions at a time when DNA exonerations are less frequent and the memories of most famous wrongful convictions are fading. Roach makes a compelling case for change that governments have so far lacked the courage to make. They include better legislative regulation of police and forensic experts and the creation of a permanent and independent federal commission both to investigate wrongful convictions and their multiple causes. Roach’s research and vast knowledge point to systemic failings in our legal system. But he also outlines vital changes that can better prevent and correct wrongful convictions. Until we do, many of the wrongfully convicted are still waiting for the promise of justice. It is an issue that affects all Canadians.

Convicting the Innocent

Author: Brandon L. Garrett

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-08-04

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0674060989

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On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington—defended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty case—was found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man. DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing. Based on trial transcripts, Garrett’s investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory. Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.

Wrongful Conviction in Canadian Law

Author: Gary Botting

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 673

ISBN-13: 9780433451235

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"Miscarriages of justice in wrongful conviction happen more often than the criminal court system would like to admit. Awareness of the causes can reduce the overall potential for miscarriage of justice. These causes include: Prosecutorial ?tunnel vision?, Failure to make full disclosure, Suborned or concocted evidence, Eyewitness misidentification, False confessions, Reliance on in-custody informers, Incompetent ?experts?, Flawed legal representation. Wrongful Conviction in Canadian Law is the first book to review and analyze recommendations of Commissions of Inquiry into wrongful convictions. Comparative analyses reveal which recommendations have been implemented as policy, passed into legislation, or endorsed by the courts. You?ll learn how the authorities could have made ? or could have avoided ? such major errors." --Publisher.

Wrongful Convictions and Miscarriages of Justice

Author: C. Ronald Huff

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-03-05

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 1135072256

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This innovative work builds on Huff and Killias’ earlier publication (2008), but is broader and more thoroughly comparative in a number of important ways: (1) while focusing heavily on wrongful convictions, it places the subject of wrongful convictions in the broader contextual framework of miscarriages of justice and provides discussions of different types of miscarriages of justice that have not previously received much scholarly attention by criminologists; (2) it addresses, in much greater detail, the questions of how, and how often, wrongful convictions occur; (3) it provides more in-depth consideration of the role of forensic science in helping produce wrongful convictions and in helping free those who have been wrongfully convicted; (4) it offers new insights into the origins and current progress of the innocence movement, as well as the challenges that await the exonerated when they return to "free" society; (5) it assesses the impact of the use of alternatives to trials (especially plea bargains in the U.S. and summary proceedings and penal orders in Europe) in producing wrongful convictions; (6) it considers how the U.S. and Canada have responded to 9/11 and the increased threat of terrorism by enacting legislation and adopting policies that may exacerbate the problem of wrongful conviction; and (7) it provides in-depth considerations of two topics related to wrongful conviction: voluntary false confessions and convictions which, although technically not wrongful since they are based on law violations, represent another type of miscarriage of justice since they are due solely to unjust laws resulting from political repression.

Compensation for Wrongful Convictions

Author: Wojciech Jasiński

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-03-14

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1000859312

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This book presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of the substantive and procedural aspects of compensation for wrongful convictions in European countries and the USA, as well as the standard derived from the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. The collection draws comparative conclusions as to the similarities and differences between selected jurisdictions and assesses the effectiveness of the national compensation schemes. This enables the designing of an optimum model of compensation, offering accessibility and effectiveness to the victims of miscarriages of justice and being acceptable to jurisdictions based on common law, and civil law traditions, as well as inquisitorial and adversarial types of criminal process. Moreover, the discussion of the minimum European standard as established in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights enables readers to identify how the Strasbourg Court can contribute to strengthening the compensation scheme. The book will be essential reading for students, academics and policymakers working in the areas of criminal law and procedure.