"I might look into the cases you mention, just out of curiosity for myself, as a crime buff."
That is super. Here are a series of articles on the case of Guy Paul Morin. As a crime buff, you will fully appreciate how neat this story is.
ilap.com
Here is an example of one of the cool articles:
Those who ruined Morin's life should be held accountable
by Donna Laframboise
Suddenly, it was all over. Nine years, nine months and one day after Guy Paul Morin was arrested on his way to a community band practice and charged with murdering Christine Jessop, the Ontario justice system admitted it made a mistake.
Nine years, nine months and one day after a dozen police officers descended on the Morin family home, rummaging through cupboards, drawers and boxes and carting away green garbage bags of personal belongings, the justice system apologized.
Nine years and nine months after this country started thinking of Guy Paul Morin as a vicious child rapist and killer, the Ontario Court of Appeal completely exonerated him yesterday.
The final stage of DNA testing in this matter began last Thursday morning. Morin's lawyers were tense. There were concerns that the semen stains found on Christine's underwear were too badly deteriorated to produce useful results.
There were fears that these stains had been contaminated either during the evidence collection process or later, when a vial containing Morin's blood broke and was spattered inside a cardboard box also containing snips of the underwear.
There was the worry that if this round of DNA tests (the previous two had been requested by the defence) didn't produce conclusive results, not enough stained material would be left for future examination with more advanced techniques.
Morin remained calm. While his legal team chewed their nails, not daring to hope the case might come to an abrupt end, Morin - mistakenly thinking they might be doubting him - assured them, "Look, if it comes back that that's my DNA on the panties, I'll jump out the window."
And then the call came. Just after 10:30 on Thursday evening, Michelle Levy, who had begun working on the Morin appeal while she was still a law student, telephoned from the Boston lab where she'd been waiting since Monday. "He's excluded," she said, giving the signal for the champagne corks to begin popping.
The test result was the best anyone could have hoped for. Conducted by no less than three scientists approved by the crown and defence, in a lab better equipped than any available in Canada, it indicated the semen could not possibly have come from Morin.
A few hours afterward, Morin was pretty much his usual self: elated but quiet, relieved but not bitter.
Indeed, one of the remarkable things about Morin is his utter lack of venom. If someone had stolen the best 10 years of my life (he's now 35), if they had built their careers by vilifying me and my family, if they had locked me behind bars for 18 months and compelled me to spend 2 1/2 years more in courtrooms, if they had left me despairing of ever enjoying a normal existence again - anger and hatred may well have consumed me. I'd probably be a cynical, paranoid person today.
But Morin remains good-humored even yet. The police investigating the Jessop murder were right in one sense. He is unusual. (In their words, a "weird-type guy.")
If we learn nothing else from this shameful affair, we would do well to remember that being out of the ordinary, failing to behave precisely as expected, being odd, doesn't make one a criminal.
And the question of what exactly this country has learned form the Morin debacle is an important one. It's now being suggested, for example, that a public inquiry into the case might not be necessary after all, that the myriad problems - planted evidence, fake police notebooks, police perjury, a sloppy autopsy, incompetent forensic analysis, crown deals with star witness who were pathological liars, crown suppression of evidence, missing and destroyed evidence - already have been documented during the marathon 1991-92 trial and then reinforced by Morin's lawyers' appeal submissions.
There's no need to go over it all again, some people seem to be saying. Rather than funding such an inquiry, why don't we use the money to compensate Morin and his family, they ask.
But there's a big problem with this line of thought. Until yesterday, the police and the crown attorneys were downplaying all of those irregularities, characterizing them as trivial. Indeed, the attorney-general's ministry was spending countless hours preparing to fight tooth and nail in court against Morin's request for permission to appeal his conviction.
If ministry officials had had their way, Morin would have spent the past two years in Kingston Penitentiary, living in fear of attacks from other inmates.
Guy Paul Morin is an innocent man. He deserves to be compensated. But we shouldn't have to choose between doing right by him and his family and calling those responsible on to the carpet.
These "errors" didn't just happen by themselves. Morin's life wasn't reduced to a shambles by random chance.
Real people pursued him relentlessly year after year. Real people refused to consider the possibility that they'd made a mistake. Real people bragged about the role they'd played in convicting him.
It's high time these people were held accountable. |
