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2005: Michel
Dumont launches billboard in Montreal |  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
Michel Dumont
Man jailed wrongfully
asks for help
Starts petition seeking
compensation. Rape conviction overturned, but Dumont seeks $8.7
million for pain and suffering
Monday, November 24, 2003
Michel Dumont, who was wrongly
accused and incarcerated for rape in the early 1990s and subsequently
had his name cleared, is still waiting for payback for the three
years that were stolen from his life.
An electrician who now lives
in La Plaine, about 30 kilometres north of Montreal, Dumont spent
34 months in the Cowansville penitentiary from July 1994 to May
1997. He has been lobbying the provincial government and his
former hometown of Boisbriand since 2001 to cough up $8.7 million
for pain, suffering and lost income opportunities.
Two years of getting nowhere
has pushed him to set up an
e-mail petition on his Web
site - www.micheldumont.qc.ca - in hope that strong public support
will light a fire under the government.
"Since June 27, 3,378
people have signed the petition," Dumont said. "It
hasn't been in the media yet, this is only through word-of-mouth."
The document urges Justice
Minister Marc Bellemare and members of the National Assembly
to make amends to Dumont and his family for the "blatant
miscarriage of justice."
Lost income, his wife's retirement
savings spent on his defence and the scorn and alienation of
his family are some of the things that Dumont is looking to correct
in a nightmare that just won't go away.
"My son and daughter were
placed in homes where they were abused," Dumont said. "I
am asking $1.2 million for each of them, plus $500,000 for my
wife for her work and the money she spent, and $5.8 million for
my time in prison, lost income, loss of my reputation and psychological
damages."
With no offer on the table
from the government, Dumont's lawyer said a petition is a step
in the right direction.
"Public opinion is quite
important in these kinds of cases," said Jean-François
Longtin.
In 1990, a Boisbriand woman
was forced into her apartment by an armed man and raped.
Based on a composite sketch
done by police, she picked Dumont, a neighbour, out of police
photos of possible suspects.
In 1992, Dumont was convicted
of sexual assault, kidnapping and uttering death threats, and
was sentenced to 52 months in prison.
Six months after his conviction,
the victim recanted after she saw a man she called Dumont's "double,"
and realized she had been mistaken. She then gave a statement
to the Boisbriand police
At Dumont's appeal in 1994,
this information wasn't brought up. His appeal was turned down
and he was sent to Cowansville.
Why this information was not
made part of the appeal process is at the crux of the civil suit,
said Longtin. "It was the duty of the attorney-general to
inform the court of appeal, this was negligence," the lawyer
said.
Not only does Dumont want compensation,
he wants it to be made automatic so others like him don't have
to spend years pursuing similar matters before the courts.
"There are currently no
guidelines, no rules for compensation, it's a discretionary matter,"
Longtin said.
Neither the lawyer nor Dumont
have given a time frame for their civil suit. They plan to pursue
the matter until justice is served.
asutherland@thegazette.canwest.com
How a woman's love corrected
an injustice: Court clears the name of Quebec man 10 years after
wrongful rape conviction
By INGRID PERITZ, GLOBE
AND MAIL Saturday, March 3, 2001
MONTREAL -- Two women entered Michel Dumont's life
and changed it forever. The first one accused him of rape, and
nearly destroyed him. The second refused to believe it, and saved
him by proving his innocence.
Last week, the Quebec Court
of Appeal acquitted Mr. Dumont of the rape conviction that had
hung over his head for a decade. The 41-year-old electrician
wept at the news, knowing he had spent nearly three tormented
years in jail for a crime he didn't commit.
"I was waiting for the
moment for so long," he recalled in an interview. "They
were 10 lost years."
Mr. Dumont's ordeal began in
1990 in Boisbriand, a bedroom community north of Montreal, where
Danielle Lechasseur was raped in her apartment after coming home
from mass.
She turned to police, but they
didn't bother visiting her apartment to collect fingerprints
or other physical evidence. Then she picked out her assailant
from a photograph, which was based on a composite sketch that
she said always left her uncertain.
At his trial, Mr. Dumont seemed
to have an ironclad alibi: At least five people, including his
first wife, testified that they had been playing cards with him
the evening of the rape.
Yet the judge discarded their
testimony. Relying solely on the victim's account, she sentenced
Mr. Dumont, a father of two with no criminal record, to four
years and four months in jail.
He was released for his appeal,
but lost it. Crushed, he left to serve his time at the Cowansville
Penitentiary in Quebec's Eastern Townships.
In a world where rapists are
prison's lowest life form, day-to-day existence was hellish.
Mr. Dumont was assaulted and taunted mercilessly. Fearing for
his life, he took to eating his meals in his cell.
"It was 'You damn pig,'
'You have the face of a rapist,' " he recalls. "I was
living with pressure all the time."
He might have been lost, were
it not for a chance encounter in 1992. Out of jail during his
appeal, Mr. Dumont attended a meeting for separated and divorced
people. There, he met a petite mother of three named Solange
Tremblay.
He spilled out his story and
braced himself for the worst. Here was a man convicted by a judge
of forcing a woman into her apartment with a knife and raping
her. But something in the plainspoken, gentle-mannered man told
Ms. Tremblay that he didn't do it.
"It was my instinct, my
intuition," she says.
Slowly, obsessively, she set
out to prove Mr. Dumont wasn't the rapist the courts said he
was. A woman who described her occupation until then as raising
her children, she began poring over 1,300 pages of court transcripts
and police reports. She wrote down inconsistencies by hand.
She began to rise in the middle
of the night as ideas popped into her head. And she began writing
a series of 17 letters to Justice Minister Allan Rock and his
successor, Anne McLellan, beseeching them to believe that Mr.
Dumont had been wrongly convicted.
"I just had to get him
out of jail. I wanted him next to me," she says. "And
I knew that if I didn't do it, no one would."
With legal costs mounting,
she cashed in the $10,000 registered retirement savings plan
that she'd scraped together from her last job as a labourer in
a lamp-fixture factory.
One day, while visiting Mr.
Dumont in jail, she proposed through the visitors' partition.
They married just before Christmas in the prison chapel, and
she dressed in white.
"I wanted him to know
there was a woman who loved him and was waiting for him,"
she says.
Meanwhile, the other woman
in Mr. Dumont's life was having a change of heart. Only two years
after fingering Mr. Dumont as her assailant, she spotted a man
in a video store who was "Mr. Dumont's double." Alarmed,
she contacted the prosecutor and gave a sworn statement to police.
"From that moment on,
I started to have doubts," Ms. Lechasseur later recounted.
"I was very scared because it became clear . . . that Michel
Dumont wasn't the one."
The crucial information was
supposedly passed on to Mr. Dumont's defence lawyer. Yet inexplicably,
it was not raised at his appeal.
Ms. Lechasseur's qualms continued
to haunt her. She expressed her doubts about Mr. Dumont's guilt
five separate times. Then, in May 1997, a television crew asked
to her come along to meet Mr. Dumont as he was being released.
She saw him at the prison gate.
"I cannot believe that
someone with so much goodness in his face could have spent so
many years in prison when he wasn't the one, and when I kept
saying so," she said.
Mr. Dumont still bore the stigma
of his rape conviction, and Ms. Tremblay kept up her campaign
to clear his name. Finally, it got results. Last fall, the Justice
Minister, Ms. McLellan, referred his case to the Court of Appeal
in light of Ms. Lechasseur's repeated expressions of doubt. Ms.
McLellan invoked the so-called mercy clause of the Criminal Code,
an extraordinary measure of last recourse designed to avoid a
miscarriage of justice when all conventional routes have been
exhausted.
On Feb. 22, the court ruled.
The victim's doubts constituted fresh evidence. The man who'd
been labelled for 10 years, was innocent.
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