|
 January 25, 2005: The Federal government
released the
first national examination of the reasons for so many wrongful
convictions in Canada. This should be required reading for every prosecutor,
cop and criminal defence lawyer in the country. News reports
Michael Burns
Michael Burns has been
vindicated after prosecutors withdrew his second-degree murder
charge, seven months after Marcel Vanasse, 40, was found dead
in his apartment after an all-night drug party.
By Gary Dimmock
Michael Burns was wrongly accused
of a murder that never happened.
The system that charged him
in the "strangling'' of an Ottawa man set him free. A new
autopsy report -- by the same pathologist who originally concluded
the man was killed -- decided that the victim in fact died of
a drug overdose.
Mr. Burns, 28, was vindicated
when prosecutors withdrew his second-degree murder charge, some
seven months after Marcel Vanasse, 40, was found dead in his
apartment after an all-night drug party.
Police had a witness who said
she vaguely recalled someone hitting the man over the head with
a blunt instrument, and the autopsy report concluded he had been
strangled to death.
Nothing could be further from
the truth.
Mr. Burns, who phoned 911 saying
someone had overdosed, stood accused of killing the same man
he took in from the cold that night.
The innocent man spent three
months and 10 days in jail until his parents put up their home
to post bail. Relieved, but still reeling from living under a
cloud of suspicion, Mr. Burns spent yesterday with close friends.
More than anything, he hopes what happened to him never happens
to anyone else.
``Life's been rough. Aside
from being under house arrest for months, the shame and humiliation
has been terrible for me and my family,'' he said from a hotel
room. ``This is my first night of real freedom and it feels good
to have this over with.
``I keep on thinking that I
could have been convicted for something I never did. I'm still
in shock,'' said Mr. Burns, who works in the kitchen of a downtown
restaurant.
The lawyer who fought for a
review of the original autopsy is now demanding an apology, and
considering a lawsuit.
``In the end, the system worked
but it worked slowly and carelessly with little care for a man
who was wrongly charged and jailed,'' lawyer Susan Mulligan said
in an interview. ``Nobody was in a rush to fix the mistake. It's
one thing to make a mistake but it's another to wait months and
months to fix it.
``It is vindication, but what
victory is there for a man and his family who have suffered all
the embarrassment and shame that is attached to someone charged
for murder? It was very trying for all of them.''
Ms. Mulligan said the case
highlights the danger of anchoring a prosecution on the opinion
of a pathologist. The lawyer called for more accountability across
the system.
``The police aren't perfect,
the pathologist's not perfect and neither is science. ... If
we didn't keep pushing for a review of the autopsy, we might
very well have had a pathologist testifying about strangulation
and jurors believing that if he was charged then he must have
done it,'' Ms. Mulligan said.
That the original autopsy and
a subsequent review, conducted by Ontario's chief medical examiner's
office, have never been disclosed to the defence raises serious
questions about the integrity of the system, she said. Because
Mr. Burns is no longer charged, prosecutors are not legally obligated
to release the reports.
The lawyer has received only
a third report in which Dr. Brian Johnston changed his opinion
on the cause of death from strangulation to an accidental drug
overdose. A toxicology report completed two weeks ago showed
that Mr. Vanasse died of a methadone overdose.
Dr. Johnston, reached at home,
confirmed that his medical opinion had changed.
The time between the original
autopsy report and the report that cleared Mr. Burns was roughly
seven months.
``Typically, when the system
makes a mistake, nobody wants to admit that they charged or locked
up the wrong guy,'' said Ms. Mulligan, who was part of the defence
team that helped free wrongfully convict Guy-Paul Morin.
For the parents of Michael
Burns, the past seven months have been terrifying. Gerald and
Jo-Ann Burns, retired civil servants, have always believed in
their son's innocence.
``It's been really embarrassing
but we've always said that he didn't do it and that it would
just take awhile to prove,'' said the man's father.
| |
Perhaps
Burns' life wouldn't have needed so much "turning around"
if he hadn't been wrongly charged in the first place? |
|
- Ordeal ends for wrongly accused
man
-
- By RICHARD ROIK February 20, 1999 Ottawa
Sun
One year after he awoke to
find a dead man in his bathroom, Gerald Michael Burns can finally
go back to bed with his legal nightmares behind him.
The 28-year-old Nepean man
who was jailed for almost four months after being wrongfully
accused of murder received a suspended sentence yesterday for
being caught with $25 worth of hash oil while he was behind bars.
"I'm very glad it's over,"
Burns said yesterday. "It's been a tough year.
"The initial murder
charge -- I was shocked at that," he said as he reflected
on what he's been through.
It was Feb. 9, 1998, that he
awoke to find 40-year-old Marcel Vanasse dead in Burns' bathroom
after being invited in from the cold the night before.
Burns immediately suspected
Vanasse had died from a drug overdose and called an ambulance,
but a pathologist initially ruled the cause of death as strangulation.
Subsequent tests concluded,
however, that Vanasse had died of an overdose of methadone, a
powerful narcotic usually used to help kick the heroin habit.
But by the time the Crown withdrew
the second-degree murder charge against Burns last October, he
had already spent almost four months in maximum security at the
local detention centre. During that time Burns had been firmly
asked by a larger inmate to retrieve some hash oil from a visitor.
Burns was later caught
with the oil.
Yesterday, defence lawyer
Susan Mulligan noted Burns has since turned his life around with
a good job, treatment for his drug habit and "reconnecting"
with his parents and his young son.
"With a little supervision
and time, we may never see him back before the courts again,"
Mulligan said.
|
The Terrible Story behind the Atif Rafay and
Sebastian Burns convictions : RCMP coerced confessions using
techniques which shame the "free" world