By: Jim Taylor

Justice system demands constant vigilance



On Tuesday, in a unanimous 303-page decision, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that Steven Truscott’s conviction in 1959 for the rape and murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper was a “miscarriage of justice and must be quashed."

        Truscott was 14 when he was sentenced to “hang by the neck until you are dead.” As media reports keep reminding us, he was the youngest Canadian ever condemned to death. Mainly because of his youth, the federal cabinet commuted his sentence to imprisonment.

        Otherwise, he might never have had his good name cleared.

        “The evil that men do lives after them,” wrote Shakespeare of Julius Caesar; “the good is oft interred with their bones.”

        The Truscott case reminds us that we need constant vigilance over our justice system.



Shedding innocent blood

  Truscott joins a long list of other men wrongly convicted of murder: Donald Marshall, Guy Paul Morin, David Milgard, Romeo Phillion, Thomas Sophonow, Gregory Parsons, James Driskell….

        Canada has had its share of mass murderers. Clifford Olson killed 10 children in B.C.; Marc Lepine shot 14 women in Montreal; Willie Pickton has been charged with 26 murders.

        But the nation itself would qualify as a mass murderer, if Canada had not abolished the death penalty in 1976. We would have on our collective hands the blood of at least a dozen persons later proven innocent.

        All of these, as renowned defence lawyer Eddie Greenspan noted in the Toronto Star, were “inexorably caught up in a malfunctioning justice machine.”

        The Canadian “justice machine” may be infinitely superior to the majority of other countries worldwide. But too often, it seeks convictions at the expense of justice.



Flawed trial

    Witness the trial of Steven Truscott.

        Several other children confirmed Truscott’s version of events; the court discounted their testimony.

        Truscott’s shoes did not match footprints left at the scene of the crime; the court ignored the contradiction.

        A pathologist, Dr. John Penistan, declared that Lynne Harper died during the only 45-minute window when she and Truscott were could have been together. No other pathologist challenged Penistan’s conclusions. The court did not even hear Penistan’s own doubts about the accuracy of his diagnosis, about which the Ontario Court of Appeal stated this week: “Dr. Penistan’s evidence providing a 45-minute window for time of death must be rejected as scientifically unsupportable.”

        “How could we have been so guilty of such appalling bias?” asked retired United Church minister John McTavish in a prophetic editorial, published in the Huntsville Forester six months ago. “All this happened, not in some corrupt banana republic, but in Ontario!”

McTavish offered his own explanation, in what he called a public apology to Steven Truscott.

        “The answer, surely, had a lot to do with the temper of the times… In the face of poor Lynne’s shocking rape and murder, the rural conservative southern Ontario people of that time and place were frightened in a way that they had never been frightened before. They couldn’t bear to live with the idea of a murderous pedophile on the loose in their sheltered community. Things had to be nailed down, and nailed down fast.

        “Nothing mattered except a verdict that would allow these frightened people to breathe freely again.”



Pointing fingers

 Julian Sher, producer of the CBC television’s Fifth Estate program on Steven Truscott, and author of the book Until You Are Dead, was disappointed that the Appeal Court refused to assign blame.

Sher said, “"I think they [the judges] fall short of a more rigorous condemnation…."

        It seems to me that Sher exhibits the same desire that resulted in the original flawed judgement – the desire to see someone punished.

        It’s called scapegoating – and it’s astonishingly popular these days south of the border. In the last few months, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, presidential advisor Karl Rove, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have all been selected as scapegoats.

        There have been so many resignations that only Vice President Dick Cheney and President George Bush himself remain to blame for anything.

        Before them, the focus was Osama bin Laden, and then, by some unaccountable sleight of hand, Saddam Hussein.

        The practice of scapegoating has its historical origins in the escape of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt, some 3500 years ago. The biblical book of Leviticus (16:20-28) describes a ritual by which the sins of the people were laid upon a goat, which was then banished into the desert.

        The goat thus bears the punishment that properly belongs to the people.

        The problem with modern-day scapegoating is that it that transfers collective responsibility onto individuals. “If it’s all his fault,” we start to believe, “then it can’t be mine.”

        George Bush may be, as his critics charge, the most incompetent, corrupt, and ideologically misguided president in history. But a majority of U.S. voters re-elected him.

        Similarly, individuals may well have erred tragically in the Truscott trial almost 50 years ago. But focusing on their mistakes may divert us from flaws in the justice system itself.



Convictions at any price

John McTavish’s apology to Steven Truscott got it right. Public pressure “must have been an overpowering factor behind the outrageous rush to judgment that culminated in an Ontario judge declaring ‘that you be hanged by the neck until you are dead.’”

        “The justice system is very intractable,” Truscott’s lawyer, James Lockyer, told the CBC the morning after the Ontario court announced Truscott’s acquittal. “It does not like to admit that it made a mistake.”

        Steven Truscott himself commented that the Ontario justice system had all the information on which the Court of Appeal based its acquittal, for at least five years, but “they fought me every step of the way.”

        Perhaps it’s time to recognize that “justice system” may be a misnomer. Now and then, the system doesn’t focus on justice but on vengeance.

        It plays into our desire to find someone to blame.

Even if it’s the wrong person.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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