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Update
on wrongful convictions in Canada, October, 2004 | Truscott
will have to wait some more | Ronald
Dalton | Greg Parsons
| Randy Druken | Tom
Sophonow | David
Milgaard | Donald
Marshall Jr. | Jason Dix
| Jerome
Kennedy | Greg
Parsons starved into settlement |
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Lamer Inquiry
Nfld. inquiry to probe
murder convictions
By KIRK MAKIN, JUSTICE
REPORTER, Mar. 22, 2003
A former chief justice of the
Supreme Court of Canada has been asked to solve one of the great
mysteries of the nation's judicial system -- why so many wrongful-murder
convictions have occurred in Newfoundland.
Antonio Lamer has been given
almost two years to delve into the wrongful convictions of Gregory
Parsons, Ronald Dalton and Randy Druken.
"[Former] chief justice
Lamer has the highest credentials," Newfoundland Justice
Minister Kelvin Parsons said in the surprise announcement yesterday.
"I have every confidence
he will complete a thorough and comprehensive inquiry."
Mr. Lamer said in an interview
that he will be on the alert for broad patterns of error that
betray systemic problems.
"When you have three cases,
then maybe you are starting to get a picture of something,"
he said.
"Or, maybe it was just
three individual boo-boos. If there has been a systemic failure,
I will flag it and make recommendations to correct it."
Mr. Lamer said that while the
cases are new to him, he hopes to hear testimony from a broad
range of those people involved. "I must admit, I didn't
know about them [the cases]," he said. "I'm told they
were the subject of great interest in Newfoundland."
Jerome Kennedy -- a defence
lawyer involved in all three cases -- said an inquiry into the
stunning rate of miscarriages is long overdue, considering that
Newfoundland has a population of 500,000 and an annual homicide
rate of less than a dozen.
"The fact they have gone
outside the province is certainly what we wanted," he said.
However, Mr. Kennedy said he will remain "cautiously optimistic"
until he hears how extensive the parameters of the inquiry will
be.
If set up properly, he said,
the inquiry will find ample evidence of police tunnel vision,
overzealous prosecution and a reliance on flimsy evidence and
unsavoury jailhouse informants. Some of the police and prosecutors
were involved in two or all three of the cases, Mr. Kennedy said.
He said Mr. Lamer will also
discover an startling anomaly: In each of the cases, the Newfoundland
Court of Appeal found sufficient error to order a new trial.
"When we get to the appellate-court
stage, the system appears to have worked incredibly," Mr.
Kennedy said. "An inquiry should also look at the positives."
Mr. Parsons was convicted of
the 1991 murder of his mother, Catherine Carroll. The evidence
centred on superficially damning hearsay as well as the lyrics
of a song Mr. Parsons once wrote, which included the words: "Kill
your parents."
Mr. Parsons was exonerated
in 1998 on the basis of DNA tests. Last month, a former friend
of the Parsons family was convicted of the killing.
Mr. Druken was convicted in
1995 of killing his girlfriend, Brenda Marie Young. After five
years behind bars, he was exonerated after DNA tests found that
a cigarette that burned a hole at the murder scene was not his.
A jailhouse informant who testified against Mr. Druken later
admitted he had lied.
Mr. Dalton was convicted in
1988 of strangling his wife to death. He served nine years before
being freed after forensic evidence showed the victim had choked
to death on a piece of food.
His charge remains in legal
limbo because of a stay of proceedings. However, activists in
the wrongful-conviction movement believe it is merely a matter
of time before he is exonerated.
© 2003 Bell Globemedia
Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Inquiry into wrongful
convictions in Newfoundland set to begin Tuesday
DENE MOORE, Canadian
Press, September 21, 2003
ST. JOHN'S, Nfld. (CP) - Ronald
Dalton spent almost nine years in prison for a murder he did
not commit.
On Tuesday, Dalton will testify
on the first day of a sweeping public inquiry into three cases
of wrongful conviction that have tainted Newfoundland's justice
system. The former bank manager from Gander, Nfld., was convicted
in 1989 of killing his wife. The case against him was based largely
on testimony from a pathologist, who had determined that Brenda
Dalton was strangled.
Ronald Dalton maintained his
innocence, saying his wife had choked on cereal. He immediately
filed an appeal but it didn't come before the court until 1997.
After hearing from several
forensic pathologists that Brenda Dalton had in fact choked to
death, the Newfoundland Court of Appeal released Dalton from
prison and ordered a new trial.
He was acquitted in June 2000.
Dalton has said he welcomes
a public inquiry. But he's disappointed that the man leading
the inquest will not be able to investigate why he was convicted
in the first place.
Antonio Lamer, a former chief
justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, is only required to determine
why Dalton's appeal took so long.
"Come August, it will
be 15 years that my wife is dead and buried," Dalton told
The Canadian Press after the province announced the inquiry.
"My sister and her husband
raised our three children while I was in prison. I was still
away from them for 10 years. You don't get back that kind of
time."
But Dalton's case is not unique.
In fact, critics of Newfoundland's
justice system have long complained that the province has had
an unusually large number of wrongful murder convictions, considering
it saw just one murder in 2001, six in 2000 and two in 2003.
Two years after Dalton was
convicted, Newfoundland was shocked by another high-profile murder
case that eventually turned into a legal fiasco.
Gregory Parsons was 19 in 1991
when he found his mother dead in her St. John's home. She had
been stabbed dozens of times.
In 1994, after a series of
delays and legal wrangling, a jury convicted him of second-degree
murder. He served six weeks before he was granted bail pending
an appeal.
Parsons was later exonerated
by DNA evidence and was formally acquitted in 1998.
Then there was the sad case
of Randy Druken, who in 1995 was convicted of the 1993 murder
of his girlfriend Brenda Marie Young, largely on the testimony
of a jailhouse informant.
He spent almost six years in
prison before he was granted an appeal in 1999. The Crown consented
to a new trial after the informant recanted, saying police had
pressured him to make a false statement.
The Crown eventually stayed
the charges.
When he announced the inquiry
last March, provincial Justice Minister Kelvin Parsons admitted
public confidence in the justice system had been shaken by these
cases.
"Someone was convicted
who was innocent," said Parsons, no relation to Greg Parsons.
"We want to know is there anything systemic in our criminal
justice system that made this happen?"
The Association in Defence
of the Wrongly Convicted, an advocacy group based in Toronto,
says the inquiry will have an impact on the entire country.
"There is no criminal
law just for Newfoundland," said Mel Green, an association
lawyer who has applied to participate in the inquiry.
"The authority and reputation
and integrity of the commission and the prominence of the inquiry
proceeding itself will ultimately lead to reforms across the
country."
The first phase of the inquiry
will deal solely with Dalton's appeal.
Over the next two weeks, the
commission will hear from eight witnesses, including court officials
and the former director of public prosecutions for the province,
Judge Colin Flynn.
"Presumably there may
be some (recommendations) made at the end as to how the process
can be improved," said Nick Avis, the commission lawyer.
"That's the whole idea of it: to see that these kinds of
things don't happen again."
Both Dalton and Druken have
launched lawsuits against the province and the police. Last year,
Parsons received an apology from the government and $650,000
in compensation.
Lamer can make recommendations
for compensation but he cannot assign any blame for the botched
cases.
The inquiry is expected to
continue until next summer, if not longer.
"There's a vast amount
of information," Avis said. "It's somewhat staggering."
The police file for the Parsons
case alone takes up seven filing cabinets.
All three men will be have
lawyers present at the inquiry, as will the Attorney General's
Department, the director of public prosecutions office, and the
Royal Newfoundland Constabulary.
Several provinces have held
inquiries into wrongful convictions.
David Milgaard was awarded
$10 million in 1999 after spending 23 years in prison for a Saskatchewan
murder he didn't commit.
A Nova Scotia royal commission
in the late 1980s ordered that Donald Marshall Jr. be given $200,000
and a lifetime pension for spending 11 years in prison for a
murder he didn't commit.
Most recently, Thomas Sophonow
was awarded $2.6 million following a public inquiry in Manitoba.
Sophonow spent nearly four years in prison for the murder of
16-year-old Winnipeg waitress Barbara Stoppel.
© Copyright 2003 The Canadian Press
Wrongful-conviction probe
frustrates lawyer : Says Nfld. government neutered inquiry
By KIRK MAKIN, JUSTICE
REPORTER, Globe and Mail, Sep. 22, 2003
An inquiry that begins tomorrow
into three Newfoundland wrongful-murder convictions has the makings
of a whitewash aimed at shielding those who are to blame, a lawyer
for the three men says.
Lawyer Jerome Kennedy accused
the Newfoundland government of cunningly neutering the commissioner
of the inquiry, former Chief Justice of Canada Antonio Lamer,
by slashing his powers.
"This commission of inquiry,
if it is to be effective, must examine how three men in a province
the size of Newfoundland could be wrongfully convicted of murder
during a six-year period," Mr. Kennedy wrote in an angry
brief to Judge Lamer on the weekend.
"To do otherwise would
be to embarrass the administration of justice and, quite simply,
waste taxpayer's money. The bottom line . . . is that the inquiry
must be done right -- or not at all."
Judge Lamer will be walking
into a hornet's nest when he arrives in St. John's today to launch
his probe. Mr. Kennedy states that the inquiry has no hope of
meeting the standards set by previous inquiries into the wrongful
convictions of Donald Marshall, Guy Paul Morin and Thomas Sophonow.
Mr. Kennedy, a towering figure
among advocates for the wrongfully convicted, successfully won
the freedom of Ronald Dalton, Randy Druken and Gregory Parsons
after years of legal battle. Two were acquitted of murder; the
charge against the third was stayed after gaping flaws surfaced
in the case against him.
In his 50-page brief, Mr. Kennedy
condemned the province for lacking the courage to simply admit
the men were not guilty. The province called the inquiry only
because of intense public pressure, he said, and has since ensured
it will be ineffective.
Mr. Kennedy argued that the
inquiry ought to have provided an opportunity for the three men
to have their names cleared publicly. That cannot happen, he
said, since establishing their innocence is not part of Mr. Lamer's
mandate.
The terms of reference for
the Dalton phase of the inquiry were particularly galling to
Mr. Kennedy. The province asked Mr. Lamer to find why Mr. Dalton's
appeal took eight years to be heard.
The Lamer inquiry cannot hope
to get to the heart of systemic problems in the justice system
or recommend compensation for the three men under this sort of
restriction, Mr. Kennedy said.
"Without an acceptance
of his innocence, the inquiry serves no practical purpose,"
he wrote.
Mr. Kennedy alleged that the
province is attempting to keep a lid on information that could
increase its liability in lawsuits the three men have launched.
"The point that still
appears to be lost on this present government is that we have
three innocent men whose lives have been devastated by the actions
of the state.
"Both they and their families
deserve answers," he said. "Truth and accountability
must be the goals of this inquiry, and let the chips fall where
they may."
Mr. Kennedy said he is pinning
his hopes on Opposition Leader Danny Williams winning a provincial
election that is in the offing. "Mr. Williams has defended
successfully in a number of murder trials," Mr. Kennedy
said. "He knows first-hand the emotional and psychological
costs of being charged with murder. A new government can change,
replace or modify the terms of reference and would not necessarily
be bound by the present terms of reference."
Mr. Dalton was acquitted of
murdering his wife at a retrial in 2000 after spending eight
years in prison. Forensic evidence pointed toward her having
choked on cereal, rather than having been strangled. Mr. Parsons
was acquitted of murdering his mother after DNA evidence showed
another man was the killer. Mr. Druken's 1995 conviction for
murdering his girlfriend was stayed by the Crown two years ago
after the Newfoundland Court of Appeal ordered a retrial because
a key witness had lied.
© 2003 Bell Globemedia
Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Newfoundland begins probe
into wrongful conviction
Canadian Press, Sep. 23,
2003
St. John's - A Newfoundland
man who spent nearly nine years in prison for a murder he did
not commit says a cloud of suspicion still hangs over him.
On the first day of a public
inquiry into three cases of wrongful conviction in the province,
Ronald Dalton said that although a jury acquitted him of his
wife's murder, there are justice officials who still refer to
him as "wrongfully acquitted."
"There's still some cloud
of suspicion hanging over me," Dalton told inquiry commissioner
Antonio Lamer on Tuesday.
It has been five years since
he was released from prison and he is still trying to put his
life back together, Mr. Dalton said, the first witness in a sweeping
inquiry that will continue for most of the next year.
"I'll always know there'll
be people out there thinking that I got away with murder and
that's not going to go away. ... I'm not going to get back the
15 years that I lost," Mr. Dalton said outside the hearing
room.
"There's no amount of
compensation or apologies that will deal with that."
Over the past decade, Newfoundland
and Labrador's justice system has been shaken by three murder
cases overturned on appeal.
Mr. Dalton was arrested and
charged the day after his wife was found dead on Aug. 16, 1988.
He was convicted the following year.
Although an appeal was filed
within weeks, it was not until 1998 that the Newfoundland Court
of Appeal heard his case. Mr. Dalton was released on bail pending
an appeal and acquitted in June, 2000.
The other two cases involved
Gregory Parsons, 19 in 1991 when he found his mother stabbed
to death in her St. John's home, and Randy Druken, imprisoned
in the 1993 murder of his girlfriend.
Mr. Parsons was convicted three
years later of second-degree murder and served six weeks before
being granted bail pending an appeal. He was later exonerated
by DNA evidence and was formally acquitted in 1998. Earlier this
year, a former friend was sentenced for the crime.
A year after Mr. Parsons was
convicted, Mr. Druken went to prison for the 1993 murder of his
girlfriend, Brenda Marie Young. He was convicted largely on the
testimony of a jailhouse informant and spent almost six years
in prison before he was granted an appeal in 1999.
As in Mr. Dalton's case, said
his lawyer, Robert Simmonds, the Crown "refuses to recognize
their innocence."
After 15 years in the cogs
of the Canadian justice system, he was as articulate as any lawyer
while testifying at Judge Lamer's inquiry.
Over several hours, he described
the difficulties he had dealing with lawyers, the legal aid system
and prison officials as he tried to appeal his conviction. He
said his family exhausted all of its savings paying for his trial
defence.
While imprisoned in a federal
institution on the mainland (there is no federal prison in Newfoundland),
he said, it sometimes took months for his lawyer or legal aid
to respond to his letters. He could rarely use the telephone
and could not meet in person with lawyers, he said.
Although Mr. Dalton appeared
at the hearings, he said he was reluctant to participate because
under the terms set out by the government Judge Lamer will not
be able to examine why he was convicted in the first place.
He said, however, that the
commissioner will be able to make a recommendation for compensation
for Mr. Dalton and Mr. Druken, both of whom are suing the province
and police. Last year, Mr. Parsons received an apology from the
government and $650,000 in compensation.
© 2003 Bell Globemedia
Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Appeal
delay questioned
By BONNIE BELEC, The Telegram,
September 24, 2003
For seven years, Ronald Dalton's
notice to appeal his second-degree murder conviction in relation
to the death of his wife sat idle at the Newfoundland Supreme
Court of Appeal.
The 47-year-old, who spent
more than eight years in prison before having his appeal heard,
explained to a commission of inquiry Tuesday that the lack of
activity on his appeal had nothing to do with him.
The hundreds of pages of correspondence
between Dalton, lawyers, the Court of Appeal and any other official
of justice he could think of is proof the father of three had
exhausted all avenues in an effort to have his appeal heard.
Dalton told the inquiry that
between the time his appeal was filed, in 1989, and 1996, not
one single piece of paper was filed on furthering his appeal.
In 1996, Dalton, who said he was tired of waiting for lawyers
to take some action, filed documents himself in the hopes of
getting a hearing.
The inquiry was called by provincial
Justice Minister Kelvin Parsons in March to look into the separate
murder convictions of Dalton, Randy Druken and Gregory Parsons
- three men who between 1989 and 1995 were convicted of brutal
murders. Evidence eventually overturned their convictions, but
not before Dalton and Druken spent years in prison for crimes
they didn't commit, and Parsons spent 10 years under a cloud
of suspicion.
Commissioner Antonio Lamer,
a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, began
hearing evidence Tuesday into why there was such a delay into
Dalton's appeal.
In response to questions by
Dalton's counsel, Bob Simmonds, Dalton said he has never received
a satisfactory explanation from either of the two lawyers who
were involved in his case as to what happened and why he sat
in prison day after day fighting to get his life back.
St. John's lawyers David Eaton
and David Day represented Dalton at different points between
the time of his arrest in 1988 in Gander and 1997, when Jerome
Kennedy took over the file.
Dalton, a former bank manager,
was convicted in 1989 of the second-degree murder of his wife,
Brenda, and sentenced to life in prison with no eligibility for
parole for 10 years.
The conviction was overturned
by the Court of Appeal in 1998 and a new trial ordered. He was
acquitted in June 2000. Inquiry counsel Nick Avis and Simmonds
went through much of the correspondence between Dalton, Justice
officials and his lawyers Tuesday.
Eaton represented Dalton at
his original trial in 1989 and filed the notice of appeal of
the murder conviction. But that was it, said Dalton.
The inquiry heard that in July
1990, Eaton wrote the Legal Aid Commission stating that Dalton's
financial resources had been depleted as a result of the trial
and inquired as to what steps Dalton must take to obtain legal
aid for his appeal.
"I paid my way into prison,
and had to beg my way out," said Dalton. Documents reveal
his defence for the trial cost about $100,000.
Between October 1990 and May
1, 1991 the legal aid appeals board agreed to authorize a legal
aid certificate to Eaton for Dalton's appeal with certain conditions.
However, the certificate was
not granted. Documents reveal that between May 1991 and February
1992, Dalton wrote Eaton four times regarding the status of his
appeal. But for 15 months Dalton heard nothing.
By August 1992 Eaton wrote
back.
"It is becoming more and
more obvious to me that finding the necessary block of time to
prepare the factum for your appeal will be very difficult if
not impossible. I therefore think that you will be better served
if another lawyer takes the matter over," reads the letter.
In response to Simmonds' questions,
Dalton said the only thing that changed between 1989 and 1992
was that he no longer had the resources to fund his appeal. Dalton
said he can speculate that the money ran out, and Eaton was too
busy to continue, but that would only be his opinion.
By July 1993, Dalton wrote
to David Day explaining Eaton had decided not to continue with
the appeal and asking him to consider taking on his case.
Through further correspondence,
Day and Dalton signed a solicitor/ client retainer agreement
in 1994.
Dalton testified that Day's
assistant, Sandra Burke, sent him a rough copy of an appeal document
that had to be filed in order to get the appeal rolling. Day
informed Dalton that the first draft would be forwarded to him
in due time.
According to the correspondence,
by April 1996, Dalton was once again losing faith and asked Day
to send the first draft of the factum to him.
He testified that when he received
it he was pretty upset because it was an exact duplicate of the
earlier document he received from Burke. He said it was as if
someone took her name and the date off and just photocopied it.
However, he persevered and
continued writing justice officials in an effort to get his appeal
heard.
In 1997, he said, Burke contacted
him and told him she couldn't see anything happening with his
appeal, and was concerned things weren't being done.
She recommended he contact
Kennedy.
At first he said legal aid
refused to hand over the certificate to Kennedy but the then
chief justice of the Court of Appeal intervened and the certificate
was issued.
He testified six weeks after
Kennedy took over the matter, a true factum was filed and a few
weeks before the appeal was heard he was released on bail. A
new trial was ordered in 1998.
Following his testimony, Dalton
told reporters while he was in prison he had no idea how long
it would take to prepare for an appeal, but he eventually came
to realize things weren't getting done.
"When you're trapped a
thousand miles away and locked up all the time it's very difficult
to find alternate counsel," he said, adding he doesn't know
what happened or why it took so long. "That's why we're
here, for somebody to try and make some sense of it."
Both Day and Eaton are expected
to give testimony today when the inquiry continues.
Lawyer traumatized by
Mt. Cashel case
C B C . C A N e w
s, Sep 25, 2003
ST. JOHN'S-- A lawyer says he was so traumatized
by working on the inquiry into sexual abuse at the Mount Cashel
orphanage, he had trouble working on Ronald Dalton's appeal.
David Day told the Lamer inquiry
into wrongful convictions in Newfoundland and Labrador on Wednesday
that the stress of working as counsel to the Hughes inquiry into
the Mount Cashel abuse left him with migraines.
"I cannot imagine I shall
ever recover from that experience, completely, in terms of the
ability to focus and to function efficiently," Day told
the inquiry.
The Mount Cashel case involved
more than 450 victims of alleged sexual abuse over a period of
nearly 50 years.
Antonio Lamer, a former justice
on the Supreme Court, is leading the commission that is looking
into the long delay between Dalton's wrongful conviction and
his release from prison. He spent more than eight years behind
bars while a string of lawyers worked on his appeal.
Day took over the appeal file
from Dalton's original trial lawyer, David Eaton, and eventually
passed it on to Jerome Kennedy.
Although he admitted to working
slowly on the file, Day said his efforts contributed to the eventual
success of the appeal.
Dalton was accused and convicted
of murdering his wife in 1989.
The verdict was eventually
overturned on appeal, and a new trial was ordered in which he
was acquitted.
The inquiry, which is also
looking into the wrongful convictions of Randy Druken and Gregory
Parsons, is limited to examining the delay in Dalton's appeal.
He wants Lamer's final report to discuss how and why he was accused
in the first place.
Written by CBC News Online
staff
Copyright © 2003 Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation - All Rights Reserved
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
