Table of contents.
The Events Leading to the Trial
The Impact of the Trials on Criminal law in Canada
Circumstantial Evidence in Criminal Law
The deletion of capital punishment in Canada
Steven Truscott Case: A Flawed Conviction Leads to Positive Change (but Raises Unanswered Questions)
The Events Leading to the Trial
On the evening of 9th June 1959, Cheryl ‘Lynne’ Harper, a 12-year-old girl, disappeared near an air force base near Clinton, Ontario in Canada. At the time of her disappearance, she and Steven Murray Truscott, who was 14 at that time, were seventh graders at the Air Vice Marshal Hugh Campbell School also near the air force base. Truscott had given Harper a ride on his bicycle and they went on to a place which up to date remains the bone of contention between the Crown and Truscott ever since. Truscott maintains that he dropped her off at a place where she then took a vehicle to head home. The Crown on the other hand, maintains that Truscott proceeded to strangle her with her own blouse and then raped her (I Lebourdais, 1966).
The Trial
Steven Truscott was arrested on the evening of June 12th 1959, and early the next day he was charged with first degree murder which is a crime under the Juvenile Delinquents Act. On 30th June of the same year, a court order gave the instructions that Truscott undergoes a trial as an adult. An attempt by his attorneys to appeal against this order was dismissed (I Lebourdais, 1966). The full trial commenced the 16th of September, the hearings being presented before a judge and jury in the Supreme Court of Ontario. All the evidence that counsel for the Crown was purely circumstantial evidence, and depended on placing the accused Truscott in the time frame and physical position of the murder. The jury returned a verdict of guilty but recommended that the accused be shown mercy. But in accordance with the law, the judge was bound to sentence the accused to death by hanging (EW Knappman, 1997).
The sentence was delivered on 30th June, 1959. An attempt to appeal the sentence in the Court of Appeal on January 1960 in Ontario was disallowed, but then the government of Canada commuted Truscott’s sentence to life imprisonment. In February the same year, another attempt to seek leave for an application to appeal the sentence and trial to the highest court in the country, the Supreme Court of Canada, was also dismissed (I Lebourdais, 1966). In 1966, the Minister in charge of Justice in Canada presented the matter to the Supreme Court of Canada for a review, called the first reference. However, the court upheld the decision of the Supreme Court of Ontario.
In 2000, Truscott, through an interview in a show on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and in a book done by a Canadian journalist, reappeared into the scene again, insisting that he was innocent and that crucial evidence had been omitted in his 1959 conviction. In 2001, Truscott attempted to have his conviction reviewed again. Through the activist James Locker of the Association in Defense of the Wrongfully Convicted, Truscott obtained the attention and reply of the Court of Appeal in Ontario. In October 28th, 2004, his request was pursued by the then Canadian federal Minister in charge of Justice. The Minister ordered that the Court of Appeal in Ontario reviews the case as an appeal and taking into consideration any fresh evidence presented.
The 2006 review of the trial
In 2006, a panel of five judges including the Chief Justice of the Court of Appeal admitted the evidence brought forward by some seventeen witnesses in the case. Then in August 2007, they heard the arguments of attorneys from both sides. The Crown was represented by the Attorney General.
In their decision, the Court of Appeal unanimously declared the conviction by the Ontario court in 1959 a miscarriage of justice. The court effectively quashed the conviction, and acquitted Steven Truscott of the murder. Its reason for the decision was on the basis of the evidentiary issues that arose from the proof presented by the Crown and its witnesses, part of the fresh evidence that defense counsel had adduced in accordance with the Criminal Code section 683(1) , and the evidence presented by experts . For instance, the autopsy results which were material to the case, produced by the doctor in the proceedings had not been admitted in the trial at the court of first and second instance (EW Knappman, 1997).
For instance, the evidence by the pathologist showed that contrary to the claim by the medical evidence relied on by the Crown in the prior proceedings, the victim, Lynne Harper had died sometime after 8 p.m. on the 9th of June 1959. This produced a material defect (as to the time of the victim’s death) in the accuracy of the Crown’s counsel’s evidence, since it meant that it was possible that the culprit was someone other than Truscott. Had the previous courts admitted this piece of evidence, the Crown would not have proved beyond reasonable doubt that Truscott was the only possible perpetrator. As a matter of law, the verdict that the jury delivered was irregular.
On this and several other instances of the fresh evidence adduced in the proceedings, Truscott was acquitted, but the court stated that it could not issue the order sought, of declaring him factually innocent. The court held this on the grounds that the appellant had not proved that he was innocent of the crime he had been accused of.
The Impact of the Trials on Criminal law in Canada
Disclosure and Discovery of Evidence
In its decision, the Court of Appeal in Ontario in the 2007 review discovered evidence that had been either disqualified or disregarded in the proceedings of the previous courts. The evidence adduced by medical experts, though superior to that that had been relied upon in the 1959 trial, proved that had the expert evidence been well performed, the matter may have had a different outcome from what transpired. Since the case involved a serious charge which on conviction attracted a mandatory death sentence by hanging, the criminal investigative procedure ought to have been handled with more thoroughness. As in several other criminal proceedings in Canada , the police investigation department attracted criticism from the media and the general public for sloppy investigations (SD Westervelt and JA Humphrey, 2001).
The failure of the court that convicted Truscott to present evidence through witnesses who would have raised doubt as to the culpability of Truscott and nobody else raised the issue as to whether the law regarding disclosure of evidence was followed in the trial. The police had overlooked the possibility of other suspects, and dived head-on to the fact that Truscott was the one who had gone with Harper from school. For instance, evidence of one sergeant Alexander Kalichuk who worked as a technician at the base (where Harper’s father worked as the senior officer) had only three weeks before the incident been found trying to a young girl of ten years to his vehicle before her father came by. He had even been charged of the attempt. This was not mentioned in the previous trial.
In R v Marshall Marshall had wrongfully been convicted of the murder of one Sandy Seale at the age of seventeen. The case, which had similar defects as the Truscott case in respect of the Crown attorney’s failure to fully disclose the required evidence, led to the alteration of rules of evidence in the Canadian Criminal Code with respect to disclosure. Now, the prosecuting counsel must adduce all the available proof without leaving out any evidence even where he or she believes it is not useful to the defense (SD Westervelt and JA Humphrey, 2001). Had the prosecution in Truscott’s case carried out all the necessary investigation and presented all possible suspects, the defense would have had the opportunity for a complete and fair trial.
Circumstantial Evidence in Criminal Law
It was evident in the 2007 hearings that the Crown in the previous proceedings had relied purely on circumstantial evidence, and that on the basis of this evidence, the Court of Appeal for Ontario in 1959 had made their decision on this evidence. Consequently, the issue of whether a court can rely only on this kind of evidence in convicting a criminal defendant came into question (MG Grossman and JV Roberts, 2011).
During the trial in 1959, the Crown adduced evidence to claim that the description of the accused boy and the time in which he had been together with the victim properly fit the time frame which the medical evidence had shown to be the proximate time of death of the victim. All their evidence thus revolved around proving that the circumstances surrounding the death of the girl were solely directed to the accused.
The deletion of capital punishment in Canada
Part of the reasons why the death penalty was abolished in Canada in 1976 may have been the public opinion that the sentence may be used on wrongful convictions (SD Westervelt and JA Humphrey, 2001). For instance, in R v Morin , a man who had been convicted of murder was acquitted of the crime in a retrial in 1995 after further evidence proved he could not have been the perpetrator (David B. Chandler, 1976). The influence of the conviction of a fourteen-year-old boy through a trial which he underwent as a minor and which led to the imprisonment of the boy in a common jail at first caused some considerable disquiet in the province and may have contributed to the abolition of the death sentence on such convictions.
Reference list
David B. Chandler, Capital punishment in Canada: a sociological study of repressive law, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press – MQUP, 1976)
EW Knappman, Great world trials, (Detroit: Gale Research, 1997)
I Lebourdais, The trial of Steven Truscott (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966)
MG Grossman and JV Roberts, Criminal Justice in Canada: A Reader (Michigan: Cengage Learning, 2011)
SD Westervelt and JA Humphrey, Wrongly convicted: perspectives on failed justice: Critical Issues in Crime and Society, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001)