Here is an interesting piece made more so by the fact NZ police and Crown heard the lecture and later had input into preparing it for publication ARTICLE: Convicting The Innocent: A Triple Failure of the Justice System NAME: BRUCE MACFARLANE * BIO: * Bruce A. MacFarlane, Q.C., of the Manitoba and Alberta Bars, Special Counsel to the Attorney General on Organized Crime. This essay is based on an earlier paper presented at the Heads of Prosecution Agencies in the Commonwealth Conference at Darwin, Australia on 7 May 2003, the Heads of Legal Aid Plans in Canada on 25 August 2003 and, once again, at the Heads of Prosecution Agencies in the Commonwealth Conference at Belfast, Northern Ireland and Dublin, Ireland during the week of 4 September 2005. Following these presentations, counsel from England, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Hong Kong and the United States, as well as Canadian provinces, provided me with a number of helpful comments. I have benefited greatly from this advice. I also wish to express my appreciation to Julia Gurr, for her assistance in updating the paper during the summer of 2005. In the result, of course, I alone am responsible for the views expressed in this essay. [Mr. MacFarlane is also a former editor-in-chief of the Manitoba Law Journal, vol. 5.--Ed.] SUMMARY: ... For centuries, the criminal justice system has developed, relied upon and incrementally refined a body of rules and procedures designed to ensure that the guilty are convicted and the innocent are acquitted. ... The Crowns case lacked any evidence of motive or confession, and neither a murder weapon nor the body of the child was found. ... Thomas Sophonow The still unresolved killing of a 16-year-old girl working in a Winnipeg doughnut shop provided the basis for Canadas most recent public inquiry into a wrongful conviction. ... By 2000/01, when the Cory Commission heard evidence, he had testified as a jailhouse informant in no less than nine criminal cases in Canada. ... As we have seen, police identification procedures can render the evidence of a key witness useless; tunnel vision can collapse the focus of the investigators to a single suspect--ignoring other avenues; inadequate police disclosure to the Crown may impede necessary disclosure to the defence; and oppressive interrogation techniques can lead to mistaken if not false confes-sions to the police. ... At trial, both the Crown and defence called expert witnesses. ... The Supreme Court added that the use of fabricated evidence can also help convincing an innocent suspect of his or her own guilt. ... The similarities to Scott are glaring, no bodies, no evidence, tunnel vision, non disclosure, useless eye witness evidence, jailhouse informers, the list goes on and on. In Canada a Commission of Inquiry is held, Sophonow was almost the last of about six, in New Zealand nothing except denial, coverup, deflect, lie, distort. and reading about retired justice Panckhurst this morning saying dont touch the legal system its working fine shows just how far from reality the judiciary really are: THE SYSTEM IS FAILING EVERY DAY IN EVERY WAY
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 23:33:35 +0000
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