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There were a number of common themes that were identified by the public commissions in Canada which include, the belief that wrongful convictions are the result of systemic inappropriate actions of numerous people in the criminal justice system. There are other factors that contribute to wrongful convictions which include:
Tunnel vision, where police investigators do not proceed with an open mind; mistaken eyewitness testimony; false confessions; in-custody informers who are not reliable; flawed forensic and expert testimony; and public and media pressure to convict.

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Reasons why Romeo Phillion was wrongfully convicted

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Reasons why Romeo Phillion was wrongfully convicted

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The first reason why he was wrongfully convicted was because of his false confession to the murder, they don't know why he confessed but according to  Dr. Gudjonsson, the world’s foremost expert on the psychology of false confessions states that there can be many motivating factors including: a desire for notoriety, a unconscious need to expiate guilt over unrelated transgressions, an inability to distinguish fact from fantasy, a desire to aid and protect someone else, typically the real criminal, and revenge. Romeo also suffered from antisocial personality disorder as well as borderline personality disorder, these two conditions may also have led him to making the false confession. Another factor contributing to Romeo's false confession was the fact that the police investigation was severely disorganized. Police officers frequently lost evidence and failed to keep records of their investigation. Lastly, the jury put too much emphasis on Mrs. Roy's eyewitness testimony. Many believe that eye witness testimony are credible but in fact, they make incorrect eyewitness identifications at an alarming rate. Innocence Project’s first 225 exoneration's of wrongly convicted persons in the US, 77% of the convictions had been based on mistaken eyewitness identification.

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Romeo Phillion after suing Ottawa police and two detectives for $14 million

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Romeo Phillion after suing Ottawa police and two detectives for $14 million

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This is relevant to the topic because he is happy for suing the people that kept him in prison for 3 decades.

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This is where Romeo Phillion spent 31 years of his life for a murder he didn't commit.

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This is Romeo Phillion's written confession to the police for the murder.

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This is a video of the timeline of what happened in the case of Romeo Phillion

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This is a video of the timeline of what happened in the case of Romeo Phillion

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This is relevant because it shows everything that happened and what he went through.

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Wrongfully Convicted of Murder Romeo Phillion spent 31 years in prison before being fully exhonerated. He sued the Ontario government, the Ottawa police force and two detectives that worked his case for $14 million. However He died before receiving any compensation

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This is a video of the organization that helped Romeo Phillion prove his innocence

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This is a video of the organization that helped Romeo Phillion prove his innocence

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This is relevant because this organization helped many of innocent victims become free.

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1.    I’m completing my case study on Romeo Phillion.

2.    Romeo Phillion was wrongfully convicted of murdering Leopold Roy and served 31 years in prison until he was proven innocent.

3.    The police had tunnel vision because once Romeo confessed to the crime, they didn’t do more research. There was mistaken eyewitness testimony because Mildred Roy (Leopold Roy’s wife) picked four other people out of pictures shown to her stating this person did it but still chose Romeo. Romeo Phillion gave a false confession because a need to draw attention to himself, his inability to distinguish fact from fantasy, his desire to protect someone else, and revenge. There was flawed forensic and expert testimony because the police failed to keep all the records and lost many others.

4.    Romeo Phillion did not receive compensation because when he sued the Ottawa police and two of the detectives, he had to wait but unfortunately 9 months later he died.

5.    I think that wrongly convicted persons do deserve compensation, how much they get depends on how long they were in prison for.

6.    What surprised me the most was that Romeo Phillion was in prison for 31 years before he was proven innocent.

7.    I’m most likely to remember from this research the fact that the police force is messed up and most of them don’t care who they put in jail, as long as they get noticed for it or get a lot of money for putting innocent people away.

Eryka Villar
100714757

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This video is about Wrongful Conviction Day

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This video is about Wrongful Conviction Day

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This is relevant because this day is celebrating the innocent people that were wrongfully convicted

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This article is about Romeo Phillion's life from when he was born until he died

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This article is about Romeo Phillion's life from when he was born until he died

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This is relevant because it shows exactly what kind of person Romeo Phillion was.

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On an unauthorized furlough from Frontenac minimum-security prison in 1990, Roméo Phillion, who had already served 18 years of a life sentence for a murder he did not commit, headed into downtown Kingston, walked into a bank and informed a teller he had a gun and wanted cash. Upon exiting with about $2,000, he caught a cab back to prison, where he was immediately arrested and sentenced to four years, to be served concurrently with the life term.

"It's nice to be doing time for something I'm actually guilty of," he told the sentencing judge.

The story captures Mr. Phillion's bitterness and frustration during his 31 1/2 years behind bars for the 1967 murder of Ottawa firefighter Leo Roy. It also illustrates the sometimes misguided spirit that kept him going until his sudden death on Monday in a Mississauga hospital from complications related to emphysema. He was 76.

A victim of long-buried police evidence and society's tendency to stereotype the poor and voiceless, in the end, Mr. Phillion found his voice - cranky, impassioned and funny.

There he was, on daises in a wheelchair, toting an oxygen tank as he addressed crowds in brief sentences punctuated with coughing fits as he caught his breath, a diminutive warrior in the battle for other voiceless prisoners who, like him, were wrongfully imprisoned.

And the lawyers and staff at the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC), who engineered his unprecedented release on bail in the summer of 2003 as he waited for a ministerial review of the conviction, became his extended family.

"He was never able to weigh pros and cons of his actions," said Win Wahrer, AIDWYC's director of client services. "It was very easy to go after Roméo Phillion. Everything about his case - his story - makes me ill."

Roméo Phillion and his twin, Donald, were born on April 29, 1939, in Cobalt, Ont., the fourth and fifth of Yvonne and Wilfred Phillion's nine children. His mother was a homemaker and his father, who was a presser in a dry-cleaning business, had a drinking problem and a mean streak.

Mostly, the children fended for themselves and the twins, especially, were mischievous and unruly, as young, unsupervised boys could be. But one day, when they were eight years old and their mother was in hospital again to give birth, their older siblings woke up to find they had disappeared.

"It turned out our father sent them away to St. Joseph's Training School, in Alfred, [Ont.]," said Simonne Snowdon, one of Mr. Phillion's four surviving sisters. "They had been throwing snowballs at cars - stuff like that. I didn't see them again for eight years."

Located east of Ottawa, St. Joe's, as it was known, would prove Mr. Phillion's ultimate undoing. Ostensibly a residential school for orphans, truants, referrals from the local Children's Aid Society and children from poor homes that could support them no longer, it was run by the lay order of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, under the supervision of the provincial government. According to testimony in a successful class-action lawsuit by former residents in the early 1990s, it was also hell, replete with beatings and sexual abuse.

"In the late 1990s, my brother [Roméo] got $50,000 as a payout for his suffering," Ms. Snowdon said. "He suffered all his life."

And so Mr. Phillion was set on his way in the world, with no real home and no support, lost and living by instinct, a habitual liar and con artist who talked a blue streak and had no sense of right and wrong - someone his AIDWYC lawyer, James Lockyer, called "a rounder."

When Mr. Roy was killed in the hallway of his Ottawa apartment building in 1967, Mr. Phillion, with a criminal record that included living off the avails of prostitution, robbery and assault, was initially a suspect. But the case's chief investigating officer determined that on the afternoon in question, he had been 237 kilometres away, at a service station in Trenton, Ont., with a car that had run out of gas on the highway.

That was the end of it until 1971, when police in New Liskeard, Ont., less than 20 kilometres north of Cobalt, where he was born, were looking for him after he allegedly pulled a shotgun on a cabdriver. To that end, they pulled in his lover at the time, Neil Miller, who reportedly told them Mr. Phillion had confessed to the murder four years earlier.

Perhaps out of fear for Mr. Miller, or wanting to impress him, Mr. Phillion confirmed what his lover had said, a grand, foolish gesture that he recanted as soon as he was being led away to a cell and would regret for the rest of his life.

Although he recalled the service station, his memory was muddied by time and hard living and he thought he had been there one day later than he actually was. His defence lawyer was never informed of the alibi, period.

Eligible for parole from 1982 on, Mr. Phillion gave up applying for it because it required an admission of guilt.

"They want you to sit there and feel remorse for something you didn't do," he told The Globe and Mail's Kirk Makin in a 2001 interview. "I'm going to fight on. I'm innocent, and they have no choice. I'll take any test they throw at me, because I'm innocent."

But no tests were "thrown." Instead, he became a pasty-faced fixture in the prison system, getting up every morning as a convicted murderer and going to bed at night as one. There were multiple suicide attempts, including one when he lowered a line pierced with fishhooks down his throat and then, scared, yanked them up again.

In the meantime, the alibi report lay buried in police records until the late 1990s, when a correctional officer discovered a copy of it among other investigative reports in Mr. Phillion's prison security file. Unlike a heavily censored file that the prisoner himself had earlier received through a Freedom of Information request, this one was clear and readable. Shocked, he passed it on to the Innocence Project at Osgoode Hall Law School, which started its own investigation.

During the 2003 bail hearing, Mr. Lockyer called his client to the stand for one reason only: "I called him as a witness ... on his bail application for one purpose: to testify that the first thing he wanted to do when he got out was to see the CN Tower," said AIDWYC lawyer James Lockyer.

"He wanted to see if something so tall could stand straight. He was on the stand for only three or four minutes. It was a way of showing just how long he'd been in prison."

A week later, when he walked out of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice building, in Toronto, newspaper photos showed him standing outside and staring at the CN Tower with wonder in his eyes.

After AIDWYC lawyers got him released on bail, Mr. Phillion had to wait another six years before the Ontario Court of Appeal overturned the original jury verdict and sent the case back for trial (rather than acquitting him outright). When the Crown withdrew the charge on the grounds that too much time had passed, he did not get what he had always desired: a ruling that he was innocent.

"It was bad, bad form on the part of the Crown," said one of his lawyers, James Lockyer. "For the rest of his life, he had that cloud hanging over his head."

Even more outrageous, Mr. Phillion never saw a penny in compensation for all the years lost and the multiple attempts at suicide, including the one where he swallowed fishhooks. Although he filed a $14-million lawsuit against police and the Attorney-General of Ontario, the Crown challenged his right to do so all the way up to the Supreme Court, which refused in February of this year to hear its appeal, thus clearing the way for his day in civil court.

His civil lawyer, David Robins, said he will consult with the estate's trustee as to whether to proceed.

Besides Ms. Snowdon, Mr. Phillion leaves three other sisters and his "extended family" in the legal community.

At birth, there were only 15 minutes separating Mr. Phillion from his twin, Donald, and the two led lives that mirrored each other. Like Roméo, Donald Phillion had a lengthy criminal record and was sentenced to life in prison, in his case for two murders near Ottawa after an ill-fated drinking spree. About a decade ago, Donald died of emphysema, the same ailment that would claim the life of his twin.

After leaving prison in July, 2003, Roméo Phillion lived frugally on his old-age pension, rooming in a Mississauga townhouse with Howie Gelfand, a furniture salesman 23 years his junior who had been dating Mr. Phillion's late niece at the time he was released and provided his surety to the court. There, he was a man of habit and prison hours, getting up at 3 o'clock each morning to care for his three cats and going to bed between 8 and 9 p.m.

In between, when he wasn't out at AIDWYC events, he cooked simple meals that he learned how to make in prison and enjoyed a love-hate relationship with TV programs such as Dog the Bounty Hunter and Judge Judy - shows where justice, such as it is, always wins out in the end.
To submit an I Remember: obit@globeandmail.com Send us a memory of someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page. Please include I Remember in the subject field.

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Roméo Phillion: Decades spent in prison for murder he didn't commit

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On an unauthorized furlough from Frontenac minimum-security prison in 1990, Roméo Phillion, who had already served 18 years of a life sentence for a murder he did not commit, headed into downtown Kingston, walked into a bank and informed a teller he had a gun and wanted cash.

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This article is about Romeo Phillion seeking compensation for his wrongful conviction

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This article is about Romeo Phillion seeking compensation for his wrongful conviction

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This is relevant because there are a lot of wrongfully convicted people that want compensation but don't always get it.

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TORONTO

Romeo Phillion - a 75-year-old man who spent almost half his life in prison for a wrongful murder conviction - says he wants to be compensated for the decades he spent behind bars before he dies.

Now his claim for compensation for the 31 years he was in prison faces another delay as the Ontario attorney general is waiting to find out if the Supreme Court of Canada will hear its appeal of the compensation order.

"I just want to be compensated before I die," Phillion said at an emotional press conference held Thursday at the Toronto office for the Association in Defence of the Wrongfully Convicted (AIDWC).

After new information became available in his conviction in the 1967 murder of an Ottawa firefighter, a new trial was ordered in 2009. The Crown withdrew the charge in 2010 because they had no reasonable hope of convicting him after 43 years.

Phillion sought damages from the province in 2012 but a Superior Court judge dismissed the claim.

However, the Ontario Court of Appeal set aside the dismissal in July of this year but the province announced last week it wanted the high court to hear their appeal.

"The Ontario government and the Crown attorneys are still dragging their feet on trying to compensate the poor man for the ordeal that he went through," AIDWC co-president Ron Dalton said Thursday. "He just wants to be compensated before he dies and at this point, after taking most of his life, that's the least the system owes him."

Ministry of the Attorney General spokesman Brendan Crawley said since the case is before the courts, "it would be inappropriate to provide any further comment."

Lawyer James Lockyer - who has represented Phillion in the past but is not his current counsel - said the Ontario government is "obfuscating and delaying Romeo's claim for compensation and making sure he doesn't get compensated.

"Let's take his case to a mediator, let an experienced retired judge look at his case," Lockyer said.

Phillion wiped away a tear as Dalton and Lockyer outlined the delays he's faced over the past several years.

"They want me to drop dead, that's what they want," Phillion said. "I want justice before I go. I need help. So help me."

Click here for a mobile-friendly link.

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Romeo Phillion seeks compensation 'before I die'

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TORONTO Romeo Phillion - a 75-year-old man who spent almost half his life in prison for a wrongful murder conviction - says he wants to be compensated for the decades he spent behind bars before he dies.

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This article is about the family of the murdered firefighter and how they believe Romeo Phillion is guilty

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This article is about the family of the murdered firefighter and how they believe Romeo Phillion is guilty

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This is relevant because it makes it difficult for Romeo's family to move on.

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The family of a murdered Ottawa firefighter say they are convinced Romeo Phillion is guilty and want him to admit his role in the crime.

BACKGROUNDER: Romeo Phillion

After 31 years in prison, Phillion was released on bail Monday while the Justice Department considers a review of his case. He was convicted of the murder of Leopold Roy in 1967.

Roy's niece Helen Faucher believes her uncle stopped Phillion as he tried to break into apartments. She and her family don't believe Phillion's claims of innocence.

"We don't want him to go back to jail. We just want him to admit he did it. That's all we want," said Faucher. "Because if he doesn't do that we can't forgive him."

Phillion's guilt has come under question since the discovery of a police document ruling him out as a suspect. The document, which was not disclosed to Phillion's lawyer, said he was not in Ottawa at the time of the murder.

He confessed to the crime, but quickly recanted, calling it a "bad joke."

Faucher says murder is no joking matter. She says her uncle's late wife, present at the murder scene, was convinced of Phillion's guilt.

"She opened the door and saw him and then saw her husband on the floor bleeding to death. So how can you possibly not remember the face of the man who killed your husband?" said Faucher.

Phillion's former lawyer says it's impossible to know whether he is guilty or not, but says he's certain his client did not receive a fair trial.

"Critical information was held back...Romeo Phillion was denied justice," said Arthur Cogan.

While a review of Phillion's case could take years, surviving members of Roy's family say they hope the conviction will be upheld and he is denied financial compensation.

"For us that would be really, really bad. If he comes out and is paid for killing my uncle," said Faucher.

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Victim's family still believes Phillion guilty | CBC News

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The family of a murdered Ottawa firefighter say they are convinced Romeo Phillion is guilty and want him to admit his role in the crime. BACKGROUNDER: Romeo Phillion After 31 years in prison, Phillion was released on bail Monday while the Justice Department considers a review of his case.