The Vancouver Sun
Monday, July 21, 1997
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DNA testing may free other innocents
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Osgoode Hall students will use refined scientific techniques to aid convicts who may have been wrongly imprisoned.
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STEPHEN BINDMAN
Southam Newspapers
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OTTAWA-A national search for more victims of wrongful convictions such as David Milgaard and Guy Paul Morin will soon be launched using DNA testing.
A Toronto law school this fall will begin Project Innocence, modeled on a successful American program that has already used genetic testing to help free nine prisoners, including a mentally retarded man on death row.
Students at Osgoode Hall law school at York University will investigate the cases of people who have exhausted their normal court appeals but insist they were wrongfully convicted.
In many of the cases, the project will arrange for free DNA testing, like the kind that exonerated Milgaard, who spent 23 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit.
"What's happened with David Milgaard indicates why the creation of the Innocence Project is of vital importance to the administration of justice," said Alan Young, one of two professors who will supervise the three-year pilot project.
"Everyone knows how difficult it is to get a government to concede that it has made an error," he said. "We should not leave the whole issue of wrongful conviction to the tenacity of the accused's mother to keep on yelling and screaming at people to review this case.
The first Project Innocence was started in 1992 at Cardozo School of Law in New York City by Barry Scheck, a professor who skyrocketed to fame as the DNA expert on O. J. Simpson's defence team.
Working with 18 students, Scheck's team reviews hundreds of cases a year, mostly rape and murder. The new Canadian effort will be a little more modest.
The four students who will start the project in September are expected to handle about two or three cases a year. The American experience is that the average file takes two years to resolve.
Young and fellow professor Dianne Martin will carefully screen cases that are presented to the Toronto-based lobby group, the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC).
"Unfortunately, as we all know, many people claim to be innocent when they're not," Young said. "In fact, everyone in prison claims to be innocent so there has to be a very rigorous screening process to ensure that our credibility isn't damaged by championing causes that aren't worthy."
Young says that although the defence association has been around for several years, it's not yet had a successful case, largely because of the difficulty of finding lawyers willing to investigate them for free.
"The beauty of our project is (that) by creating a clinical program we can now, in effect, provide free labor based on the premise that students are doing this for educational purposes and learning a lot about the process," Young said.
Although Young expects most of the cases the project will handle will involve DNA, it will also look at other "viruses that may infect the integrity" of a conviction-false confessions, improper eyewitness identification, jailhouse informants and improper Crown disclosure of evidence.
"The reason why DNA evidence has become so popular in criminal justice is because it approaches mathematical certainty in terms of proof," he said.
The pilot project is expected to cost between $35,000 and $100,000 a year and a DNA lab, Helix Biotech, has agreed to provide two or three free DNA tests a year.
The first case the program plans to tackle is that of Donzel Young, a Jamaican immigrant who was killed in prison while serving a life sentence for the murder of two brothers at a Toronto housing complex.
AIDWYC's investigation showed another man, who was later shot dead during a drug deal, actually confessed to the killing.
Though Young believes there's a "dreadful" wrongful conviction problem in the United States he said he has no idea what to expect in Canada.
Southam News
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