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a nation whispers, “we always knew that he’d go free”
28 Aug 07
In 1959 a twelve-year-old girl named Lynne Harper was brutally murdered near a small town in Southern Ontario. I was born seven years later in a city about an hour’s drive away, and as a child growing up in the 70s I can remember people still talking about the murder. Of course, Lynne Harper’s wasn’t the name I knew. The name I knew was Steven Truscott.
Truscott was 14 at the time of the murder. He was tried, found guilty, and convicted to death by hanging. The death sentence was commuted to life in prison and he was later paroled and lived for a number of years under another name.
This is a man whose name I have known all my life, always connected to the notion of wrongful conviction. As a child I remember my grandmother referring to him as that poor boy who went to jail when everybody knew he didn’t kill that girl. But go to jail he did. The public reaction to his being found guilty was mixed, but of historic importance here is the public outrage at the idea of the state executing a 14-year-old boy. In many ways this case led directly to the abolition of the death penalty in Canada.
The simplest argument against the death penalty is that you can’t bring the wrongfully convicted back. Men like Donald Marshall, Guy Paul Morin, and David Milgaard might not have lived long enough to see the invention of the DNA technologies that exonerated them. There are, of course, more sophisticated arguments to support the abolition of the death penalty, but this simplest one seems incontrovertible.
Today, that seems like a bit of an aside. Today, 48 years after going to jail for a murder he didn’t commit, Steven Truscott was acquitted by the Ontario Court of Appeal.
Sources
CBC News. In Search of Justice.
CBC News: the fifth estate. The Steven Truscott Story: Moment of Truth.
R v Truscott. The Canadian Encyclopedia.
Steven Truscott. Wikipedia.
CBC News. Wrongfully Convicted.
Tragically Hip. Wheat Kings.
Posted by pzed on August 28, 2007 at 9.58pm
Categories: none of the above
Comments on "a nation whispers, “we always knew that he’d go free”"
I’m tearing up all over again reading this. To have this man’s story, such a part of our collective consciousness, finally brought to its rightful end, it’s almost like it makes us all better people, in a way. Does that make sense?
Posted by jodi on August 28, 2007 at 11.09pm :: link
I considered saying something about the debt Canada owes to Steven Truscott, but it seemed kind of odd considering all he did was steadfastly proclaim his innocence. The fact that he has been acquitted certainly rights what seems an ancient wrong, but if you look at the CBC News Wrongfully Convicted page, it’s pretty clear this kind of thing still happens.
The other sad part of all this, which I didn’t really know how to mention in my post, is the limbo to which that the Harper family is consigned. The court acquitted Truscott, but did not go so far as to declare him innocent, primarily because the evidence (including anything that might have been used to gather DNA samples) has been destroyed. There are two wrongs in this case, and while Truscott has been exonerated, the Harper family will never know who murdered their little girl.
Posted by pzed on August 29, 2007 at 11.15am :: link
Yes, the same limbo in which the Jessop family resides. That’s what’s most infuriating, and most heartbreaking: investigations coming to a halt, wasted time, chances to find the truth disintegrating, lost. We need a better system, a foolproof system that’s built upon our knowledge of these failures.
Posted by jodi on August 29, 2007 at 1.38pm :: link
