A comedic movie from 1993 entitled “Groundhog Day” seems out of context with the latest news of another acquittal of a man who was finally found innocent decades after a murder in Winnipeg, Manitoba in the mid-1970s. Watching the news conference unfold on October 3, 2024, in front of the Law Courts building in Winnipeg, demonstrated that the two have a bazaar relationship.
At the news conference were lawyers for the convicted/acquitted man, Jerome Kennedy and James Lockyer, director of the Innocence Canada.
Bill Murray, who starred in the Groundhog Day movie, became trapped in a time warp such that he kept reliving Groundhog Day, over and over again, until he came to a special realization about life. This realization released him from his time warp prison and the movie ended. While the movie was just fiction, one could believe that what goes on in many courtrooms in Canada is also just that, fiction, with a large spoonful of deception.
In real life, the news conference was about the acquittal of an indigenous man, Clarence Woodhouse, who was convicted of murder, based on false statements developed by police who reportedly tricked Woodhouse, who was not fluent in English, and “coerced and manufactured the statement from Woodhouse” (statement from Crown Attorney).
This process is a Groundhog Day time warp because it has recurred over and over again, after persons have lived in prisons for many years, before being rescued. Names of past persons who were rescued from murder convictions include Steven Truscott, David Milgaard, Donald Marshall, and Guy Paul Morin. But these high profile cases are just the tip of the iceberg. Many wrongful convictions are never reported, often because they involve lesser crimes than murder.
When news conferences are held announcing an acquittal there is often a collective exuberance, expressing a happy occasion. Little emphasis is given to the point that there was a “wrongful” conviction and therefore that there was a wrongful action, by someone, often in the justice system, who destroyed someone’s life. While apologies are given and government money is passed on to the acquitted, nothing further is ever reported as to who was responsible for the miscarriage of justice.
In the Woodhouse retrial Chief Justice Glenn Joyal reportedly apologized to Woodhouse stating “You were wrongfully convicted, You were innocent”. It was also reported that Joyal determined the conviction involved systemic discrimination. It was reported that the judge then went to some length to discuss past wrongdoings of the justice system.
While I have not spent many days in courtrooms, my three dozen appearances as an expert witness in motor vehicle collision cases have led to my own recognition of what took place during those trials.
In one of the earliest trials in the 1980s I witnessed a female driver convicted of killing another driver solely on the false testimony of “witnesses” who claimed to have seen a red vehicle pass them on a dark and rainy night. In fact, I conducted a detailed study of the two involved vehicles. Transport Canada had purchased both vehicles and brought them to Ottawa. Both vehicles were placed on axle stands, a few feet apart, and I spent a full week exploring the vehicle damage, taking measurements and creating scale diagrams. This led to my typical procedures of identifying “points of mutual contact” whereby I could determine how the vehicles moved with respect to each other. This also led to the determination of the direction of rotation of the vehicles which turned out to be contrary to what the witnesses stated. Yet I recall vividly the reported words of the judge who claimed that the manner in which the vehicles moved was obvious from how the vehicles were positioned at rest. He did not need no explanations from an expert. He believed he clearly understood the evidence even though he never conducted a detailed investigation of a damaged vehicle in his life. He further commented that my report was just a series of unreliable personal suppositions. I later contacted a forensic expert at Toronto’s Centre of Forensic Science and obtained further support from another well-known engineer who also supported my conclusions. Despite our opinions this still did not convince the judge. It took an appeal of the conviction to finally exonerate the female driver who went through years of hell in the process. Naively, I concluded that this case was just an outlier while I continued to believe in the ability of the justice system to perform properly.
It took a number of further incidents in the future where I finally came to the conclusion that, indeed, there are major problems with the proper functioning of the justice system. Some judges, who I believed would be unbiased analysts of evidence, have demonstrated that they are unreliable. And because they are accountable to no one, end up destroying the foundations of the justice system that we must all rely on. Whenever a global comment like this is made it affects the reputation of all judges simply because they wear the same cloth and carry the same title. And that is unfortunate.
In my experience the justice system has always been plagued by inappropriate operators, whether they be civilian witnesses, expert witnesses, police and lawyers (on both sides of the aisle). It was always the judges, who were required to be totally unbiased and independent of these coercions, who kept the system in balance. While I have observed some high-quality triers-of-fact I have also observed the opposite: judges who seemed to purposely ignore objective evidence, or prevented evidence from being entered in as testimony, for the seeming purpose of being able to make their decisions solely on their “inferences”, which do not require any objective evidence for their support. These decisions can be called “Because I Say So” or BISS decisions, because they are based on the often mistaken belief that the judge is perfectly capable of discerning who is telling the truth and who is lying regardless of what additional objective evidence may exist. Many years of bench work can be helpful but it can also be misguiding when a judge comes to the belief that they no longer need to listen to evidence as the conclusion has already been made in their mind.
How is it that, after so many years, Justice Joyal was capable of determining there was systemic discrimination in Woodhouse’s case yet that was not appreciated in the original trial? While many glowing comments are made at news conferences where speakers explain how the system has been changed for the better I, regrettably, do not see it in real life.
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