On Sept. 15, 1990, Tim Rees was sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole for at least 15 years for a ten-year-old girl’s murder in Ontario, Canada. Rees always denied killing the girl. However, after serving 26 years in prison for the murder, it was announced that Rees, who is now sixty years old, will have his sentence reviewed by the Ontario Court of Appeal, after Canada’s Attorney General recently ordered a new appeal. The AG noted in his press release that there is a “reasonable basis to conclude that a miscarriage of justice likely occurred.” Rees was released on parole in 2016, where he remains. On the year he was released, Innocence Canada — a non-profit organization that advocates for wrongfully convicted citizens — took his case. Two years later, an application was filed with the former minister of justice claiming Rees had been wrongfully convicted. Their strongest argument for the application was an undisclosed “highly incriminating statement” by the landlord of the victim’s family home, which he had made to the Toronto police homicide squad.
Tim Rees case is only the most recent example of someone who was wrongfully convicted of a crime and later could be exonerated due to new evidence. Many more cases came about in the U.S. and Canada with the arrival of DNA tests used to investigate previous convictions years ago, used eventually to determine the innocence of those wrongfully convicted. I would highly recommend that one read *Wrongfully Convicted by Kent Roach which highlights several cases of wrongful convictions in Canada to get a fuller understanding of this past and current issue.
As noted, under the current system, it’s the justice minister who decides on miscarriage of justice applications, often a long and costly process. Recently, the current federal government in Canada introduced Bill C-40 which if passed would create an independent commission to review such applications and make decisions about whether to order a new trial or appeal. James Lockyer, co-founder of Innocence Canada, said his organization has been pushing for the creation of an independent commission for some 30 years. The proposed Miscarriage of Justice Review Commission would be an independent administrative body. It would have a full-time chief commissioner and four to eight other commissioners. According to background briefing materials, at least one-third, but not more than half, must be lawyers with experience in criminal law. Such independent bodies and processes already exist in countries such as the U.K., Scotland and New Zealand. They apparently have seen the appeals system move much more quickly and flexibly with respect to the applications that come forward.
In recent years, there understandingly has been much attention given to the rights of victims of crime. To have introduced any legislation facilitating the review of potentially wrongful convictions does take a certain degree of political courage as noted by James Lockyer. However, there has been one too many cases of wrongful convictions to simply ignore the issue. In Canada, the issue was raised years ago in the sensational case of David Milgaard who was wrongfully convicted for rape and murder in 1969 and spent 23 years in jail. As Lockyer noted in a National Post article published on February 16, 2023 that: “If this commission had existed back in the early 1970s, it can safely be said it would have saved David Milgaard at least two decades of those 23 years that he spent in prison.”
Everyone recognizes that our justice systems, including law and enforcement, are not always about justice but sometimes about process and political pressures. The system is not infallible. There needs to be better means for those who possibly were wrongfully convicted to have their cases reviewed in an independent, fair and timely manner.
*Wrongfully Convicted (Guilty Pleas, Imagined Crimes, and What Canada Must Do To Safeguard Justice): Kent Roach (Simon & Schuster, Toronto, 2023)
FROLITICKS 