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Some years ago, I covered a murder trial that troubled me.
Truth is, it still does.
The man was convicted and sent
to prison. The Crown had a fair amount of circumstantial evidence,
including plausible details about a potential motive. What troubled me was
the scenario that was put forth for the incident had a number of holes and
inconsistencies. They were enough to make me believe a murder conviction
was not warranted. The jury, however, disagreed.
Some months later, I bumped
into the crown attorney who prosecuted the case. We chatted for a couple of
minutes, with that particular trial coming up in the conversation. He asked
for my thought, and I told him candidly that I had problems with the way
things were resolved. I went on to say that it had sparked something of a
crisis of faith for me in our judicial system, as I cited the names of
several high-profile people who had lately received murder convictions who
I thought might be innocent. One of them was Robert Baltovich.
The prosecutor looked both
taken aback and amused at what I was saying.
"You probably think Guy
Paul Morin is innocent too," he remarked (this was some time before
the cloud was lifted from Morin's head.)
"Yes," I replied,
meeting his gaze, "as a matter of fact I do."
"Remind me never to put
you on one of my juries," the attorney chuckled.
I reflected on that conversation
with some satisfaction last week, when I learned that Baltovich had been
acquitted of killing Elizabeth Bain.
I wasn't kidding when I said I
had problems with his conviction. I recall reading accounts of the trial at
the time, and getting the feeling the case against Baltovich was weak. And
it gratified me to a certain extent as the years went by, that every time I
read or heard about Baltovich in the news, the
story seemed to be based on growing doubt over his guilt in the matter. A
time progressed, I came to believe we would see a day like
last Tuesday, with Baltovich walking away free and clear.
And we again are left to
wonder if there is something fundamentally wrong with our judicial system.
Add Baltovich to a growing list of convicted murderers in this country who
have eventually been found to have been not guilty. I think of Morin,
Stephen Truscott, David Milgaard, Donald
Marshall. It's easy to cite these examples, because everyone has heard of
them. The frightening part of all this is the realization that these were
the wrongfully convicted people we did hear about. What about the ones who
were never cleared? How many people, in Canada alone, have done long
stretches behind bars, or were even executed many years ago for crimes they
didn't do?
This story is tragic on a
couple of levels. A young woman apparently died violently, although since
her body has never been found, a big question mark hangs over that
statement. The Bain family has lost a loved one, and the rest of us can
only ponder what that must be like. The ordeal that Baltovich and his
family have been put through is terrible, and as things developed,
undeserved.
And we are left with the
conclusion that assuming Elizabeth Bain was murdered, her killer could well
be walking the streets today. True, there's a theory that Paul Bernardo
could have been mixed up in all this, but it's only a theory at this time.
And I would think the last thing the Bain family needs
is for the system to get the wrong guy a second time.
That's an issue that has to be
addressed just about every time we find someone has been wrongfully
convicted of murder. We have to accept that the real killer got away with
it, as was evidently the case with whoever it
was who killed Lynne Harper in 1959, then watched Truscott take the rap.
The fact that the wrong person
can be convicted is one of my main arguments against capital punishment,
and to my mind, it's an unanswerable one. How is the system supposed to
apologize to the grave of a person who has been wrongfully put to death? A
human life should not be the subject of a judicial translation of
"Oops!"
Now I know this reads a bit
like I'm knocking our judicial system, and I guess to an extent, I am. But
as I've stated in this forum many times in the past, I realize there are
few better systems practised in the world for dealing with criminals. But
it is a fact that there is plenty of room for improvement, and we received
another clear lesson in that reality last week; a lesson to go with all the
others we've received over the years. Too many innocent people are being
sent away for too many years, and in some cases, they are being put away
for life.
Even if we don't have capital
punishment any more (it's refreshing that the calls for its restoration
don't seem as common as they were a couple of years ago), the fact that
innocent people can go to prison in our society is something that should
concern us all.
Like I stated before, that
trial many years ago still troubles me. I will probably never know for sure
if the man rightly or wrongly convicted, but i will always have some doubt.
There have been several job changes for me since then, and I have lost
track of the issue. I don't know what eventually happened to the man who
was sent to prison, or even if he's still alive. There were people at the
time who criticized and even ridiculed me for voicing my concerns
over the matter.
There is a poem, knows as
First They Came, which is attributed to a Pastor Martin Niemoller, and it
deals with the way intellectuals reacted (or failed to react) to the early
days of the Nazi regime in Germany, rationalizing one didn't have to speak
out when they came after the communists if one was not a communist, and it
was the same when the authorities went after the social democrats, trade
unionists and finally the Jews.
"When they came for
me," the poem concludes, "there was no one left to speak
out."
Am I going a bit over the top
with this reference? Perhaps. But you or I could be the next person facing
the system for a murder we did not commit, and waiting for someone to speak
out on our behalf.
You could argue it would never
happen. I wonder if such thoughts ever entered Baltovich's mind in the
years before his ordeal started.
The truth is if it could
happen to a Baltovich or a Truscott, it could happen to any of us.
All we have to be is innocent.
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