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CASE STUDY: STEVEN TRUSCOTT

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CASE STUDY: STEVEN TRUSCOTT

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Steven Truscott ~ "Youngest death-row inmate" 

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Steven Truscott ~ "Youngest death-row inmate" 

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This picture shows Steven Truscott. He became Canada's youngest death-row inmate in 1959 when he was sentenced to be hanged at age 14 for the "murder" of Lynne Harper. His case is one of the most famous and controversial in Canadian history.

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"Too soon to consider compensation",  says Truscott

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"Too soon to consider compensation",  says Truscott

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In this article, Steven Truscott states he's still in shock from news of his acquittal and hasn't had time to think about whether he'll seek compensation for being wrongly convicted of his “murder” in 1959 of Lynn Harper. This acquittal was a moment for history for Truscott as it's taken 48 years to get this far. After so many disappointments, including a Supreme Court decision in 1966 not to order a retrial in his case, he never imagined he would be acquitted. James Lockyer was the lawyer to notify Truscott with this exhilarating news that would be life changing for not only himself, but his family.

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CBC.ca - watch, listen, and discover with Canada's Public Broadcaster

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Canada's home for News, Entertainment, Sports, Music and much more

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A Canadian court acquitted Steven Truscott today and called his murder conviction "A Miscarriage Of Justice".The gist of the matter in this video obtains to Steven Truscott and his acquittal. At the opening of the clip – they did a short interview on Steven Truscott’s daughter. Within that interview time they accentuated their support and words of encouragement that lead up to that day. The interviewers also cited that the court did not voice that Steven was one hundred percent guilty, and that there would have to be another trial for that. Stevens daughter declared that it did not trouble her at all, and that she knows whom her dad really is.

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Worst Cases Of People Being Wrongly Accused

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A Canadian court acquitted Steven Truscott today and called his murder conviction "A Miscarriage Of Justice". http://www.audiobooks.com/audiobook/think-and-grow-rich/198261

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Timeline of Events for the Steven Truscott Case 

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Timeline of Events for the Steven Truscott Case 

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The relevance of this article to the case study is that it gives a play-by-play description of the events involving Steven Truscott.  It focuses on the night of the murder of Lynn Harper, Truscott’s arrest, his subsequent court hearings, and new evidence introduced throughout.  Truscott was charged with first-degree murder and the magistrate determined he should stand trial as an adult.  The court held a preliminary hearing and allowed testimony from 31 witnesses and examined 21 pieces of evidence. With all the evidence presented, it was determined that the case should go to trial (Truscott pleaded not guilty).  The timeline lists important dates and events that occurred over the course of the investigation, trial and eventual conviction. The article shows the times of relevant incidents and concludes with the acquittal of Mr. Truscott. In the end, he was awarded $6.5 million in compensation.

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As shown in the picture, when arrested Steven Truscott was only 14 years old. The image also shows his measurements at the time of arrest. He was 5 ft 8 and weighed only 131 pounds. Obviously, this would make him a small fish in the prison environment where he would subsequently spend 10 years. The mugshot was taken in 1959. The photo is relevant because it shows how vulnerable Steven Truscott was as a teenager, he certainly doesn’t adopt the appearance of a hardened criminal.

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Steven Truscott's $6.5 Million Award for Wrongful Conviction

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Steven Truscott's $6.5 Million Award for Wrongful Conviction

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The content of the video discusses the effort of Steven Truscott to clear his name after 45 years of being labeled a killer. It discusses the possibility of his 1959 murder conviction being overturned, and the chance of financial compensation. Criminal attorney Joseph Neuberger speaks on the similarities between the Truscott case and that of David Milgaard. In both instances, the arrests were made within 24 hours of the murder. Neuberger explains how the Truscott case would have resulted in an acquittal if it were to take place in modern times (with modern forensic advances). Truscott has to wait 10 years for parole to be granted, and was originally sentenced to death. He was only 14 at the time of his arrest for the murder of Lynne Harper.

Video Follow-up

Steven Truscott was awarded $6.5 million on July 7’th, 2008.

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Steven Truscott's $6.5 Million Award for Wrongful Conviction

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This Toronto Star article was published the day that Steven Truscott’s long fight for justice ended in victory, on August 28, 2007. The article gathered statements from Mr. Truscott’s family, friends, the judge panel, Ontario Attorney General, and more. This was a huge day for Mr. Truscott and everyone who supported him, and the article describes all of that. It’s funny to read Truscott’s statements about the future in this article – the day he was released - and compare it to today. This article captures a huge part of history.

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Steven Truscott's long fight for justice ended in victory Tuesday when the Ontario Court of Appeal acquitted him of the 1959 murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper and pronounced his conviction "a miscarriage of justice."

The court rejected the option of ordering a new trial for the 62-year-old Guelph millwright, who was sentenced to hang for the murder at age 14.

A new trial after so many years would be a "practical impossibility" and would amount to an injustice given that Truscott and his family have lived with the burden of a wrongful conviction for nearly half a century, the court said in its 300-page decision.

"The appellant in this case served ten years in the penitentiary and has lived his entire adult life in the shadow of a conviction that we have concluded must be quashed as a miscarriage of justice," said the five judge panel, speaking in one voice simply as "the court."

"I never in my wildest dreams expected in my lifetime for this to come true," Truscott told a packed news conference Tuesday afternoon at the offices of his lawyers and the group that helped to secure the acquittal, the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted.

"It's a dream come true."

Moments after the judgment was publicly released, Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant held a news conference outside Osgoode Hall, where he apologized to Truscott, who spent 80 per cent of his life living as a convicted murderer.

"For that miscarriage of justice, on behalf of the government, I am truly sorry," Bryant said.

He told reporters he has asked Sydney Robins, a retired judge of the Ontario Court of Appeal, to provide "advice" to the attorney-general's ministry on the issue of compensation for Truscott.

Bryant added that he didn't know how any compensation payment might be affected by the court's failure to declare Truscott factually innocent.

Lynne Harper's father, Lesley, a former RCAF flying officer, and one of her two brothers will have input into those compensation discussions. Bryant said he spoke this morning with her brother, who asked if the family could make submissions to Robins.

Bryant said he agreed.

Truscott had harsh words for the Crown, saying it fought his lawyers "every step of the way" for years despite having the fresh evidence which helped overturn his conviction. "The Crown chooses not to think about justice," Truscott said at Tuesday afternoon's news conference.

"I know (Bryant) apologized on behalf of the government, but I don't really feel that the apology was sincere. For the past four and a half years they had the same evidence as what the judges have had, and they chose to fight us every step of the way. I don't feel the apology was sincere."

During oral arguments before the court earlier this year, Truscott's legal team urged the court to go even further - not just acquitting him, but declaring him innocent.

But the court said it was in no position to do so, pointing to the difficulty in making a case for absolute innocence given the absence of DNA.

"The appellant has not demonstrated his factual innocence," said Justice David Doherty, Karen Weiler, Marc Rosenberg, Michael Moldaver and former Ontario Chief Justice Roy McMurtry.

"To do so would be a most daunting task absent definitive forensic evidence such as DNA. Despite the appellant's best efforts, that kind of evidence is not available."

"The task of demonstrating innocence is particularly difficult in this case where in addition to the passage of almost a half-century since the crime, certain immutable facts cast some suspicion on the appellant," the court added. For example, Truscott was the last person known to see Lynne alive.

But while a conviction would still be possible, the more likely result at any hypothetical new trial would be that Truscott would be acquitted, the court said.

The court quashed Truscott's conviction on the basis of fresh evidence from medical experts and previously undisclosed reports authored by Dr. John Penistan, who conducted the autopsy on Lynne's body, which "destroys" the "damning" testimony that helped convict Truscott in 1959.

Penistan claimed that by examining the state of Lynne's stomach contents he could fix her time of death to between 7 p.m. and 7:45 p.m. on June 9, 1959, a narrow time frame that gave Truscott exclusive opportunity to commit the murder.

The use of stomach contents to ascertain when a person died is a tool that "cannot withstand scientific scrutiny" and expert evidence now confirms she could have died much later, the court said.

The court's judgment ends one of the longest and most fiercely contested legal battles in Canadian history. Five decades after the crime took place, with the possibility of wrongful convictions widely acknowledged, Ontario's attorney general fought assiduously to prevent the case from being reopened.

The story began on hot summer night, June 9, 1959, at the school grounds on the Royal Canadian Air Force base near Clinton, Ont., when Lynne climbed onto the crossbar of Truscott's bicycle. Both lived on the base with their families.

Truscott told the Ontario Provincial Police that Lynne had asked for a ride to Highway 8 and hoped to visit some ponies at a nearby farm. He said they headed north, along what was known as the "County Road."

After he dropped her off at the highway, Truscott said, he turned around and saw her getting into a grey 1959 Chevy that had either a yellow licence plate or bumper sticker.

Lynne's body was found by an RCAF search party two days later, just off the County Road, in a grove of maple and ash trees known as "Lawson's Bush."

Had she lived, Friday (Aug. 31) would have been her 61st birthday.

Today's ruling comes ten years to the day Truscott's lawyers notified the attorney general's ministry their client wanted his case reopened and had consented to having exhibits from the 1959 trial subjected to DNA testing.

All evidence that might have been suitable for testing, however, had been destroyed. Truscott instead applied to the federal justice minister to have his case reviewed under sec. 690 of the Criminal Code (now sec. 696.1).

In a Nov. 2001 brief to the government, his lawyers argued the Crown and police withheld crucial evidence from the defence at Truscott's 1959 trial and that the trial itself was inherently unfair.

The federal government retained retired Quebec appeal court judge Fred Kaufman to review the case. Kaufman concluded there was reason to believe a miscarriage of justice likely occurred, but said some of the evidence before him may not be admissible in a court of law.

His recommendation that the case be sent to the Ontario Court of Appeal was accepted by Justice Minister Irwin Cotler in 2004. In June 2006, a five-judge panel began reviewing the case, including a mountain of fresh evidence, as if it were an appeal of Truscott's 1959 conviction.

The Crown's circumstantial case against Truscott essentially consisted of two parts. The first was the so-called "County Road" evidence, which consisted of eyewitness accounts from people, many of them children, about Steven and Lynne's whereabouts along the County Road the night she disappeared.

The second was so-called scientific and medical evidence purporting to establish Lynne's time of death.

During an autopsy at a Clinton funeral home, Dr. John Penistan, the regional pathologist, made what was perhaps the most crucial finding in the case. He claimed that by examining Lynne's stomach contents - placing them in a jar and holding them up to a light bulb - he could tell that she died within two hours of eating dinner, pinpointing her time of death at between 7 p.m. and 7:45 p.m. on June 9, 1959.

The evidence was devastating for Truscott, who acknowledged being with her at that time. At the 1959 trial, the Crown attorney told jurors the evidence tightened like a vise around Truscott's neck.

But other experts expressed doubts at the time about the ability to use stomach contents to determine a person's time of death and the methodology has now been discredited.

In fact, during hearings in the case last year, the Ontario Court of Appeal was told that for nearly 40 years, the federal government had notes and memos buried in its files indicating that much of Penistan's evidence was founded on "entirely and absolutely wrong" medical and scientific conclusions.

The federal justice department sought out expert medical opinions about Penistan's findings in 1966, just weeks before the government referred Truscott's case to the Supreme Court of Canada for review.

The experts, among them a pathologist employed by the federal government, warned there was "no justification" for Penistan's claims.

But at no time did justice department officials ever disclose the information to Truscott's lawyers or the Supreme Court judges, who ultimately ruled 8-1 to uphold the conviction, the Ontario Court of Appeal was told.

The documents were released to Truscott's lawyers in 2005.

Meanwhile, the County Road witnesses included two boys, Gord Logan and Dougie Oates, who told police that while they were swimming and catching turtles in the Bayfield River on the night of June 9, they saw Steven and Lynne ride over a bridge towards the highway. Steven later rode back alone, they said.

At the 1959 trial, the Crown painted the boys as liars, alleging they were part of a conspiracy orchestrated by Truscott. The prosecution's theory was that Steven and Lynne never made it to the highway.

The Crown alleged that Truscott veered off the County Road well south of the bridge and headed into Lawson's bush, where he raped and murdered Lynne.

A 9-year-old girl named Karen Daum, however, corroborated much of Truscott's statement. She told police in June of 1959 that she saw Lynne and Steven riding north of the bush, towards the highway. Daum was never called to testify at the 1959 trial.

Testifying before the appeal court in 2006, Daum, now Karen Jutzi, recanted her 1959 police statement.

Another prominent witness at the 1959 trial was a 13-year-old girl named Jocelyne Gaudet, who testified that she'd made a "date" with Truscott to meet at Lawson's Bush around 6:30 p.m. on June 9, 1959 to look for calves.

The Crown's maintained that when Gaudet didn't show up, Lynne became a substitute for Truscott, who was portrayed as a lust-crazed teenager intent on luring her into the bush.

That theory showed serious signs of splintering six years ago, however, when two women who went to nursing school with Gaudet in Montreal in the 1960s came forward.

At a get-together in a student residence in 1966, just before the Supreme Court hearing began, Gaudet announced that she had lied at Truscott's trial, the women told the Ontario Court of Appeal last year.

Soon after her shocking outburst, Gaudet checked herself into a psychiatric hospital.

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Steven Truscott's long fight for justice ended in victory today when the Ontario Court of Appeal acquitted him of the 1959 murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper and pronounced his conviction "a miscarriage of justice." Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant said he is considering compensation for Truscott.

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Steven Truscott ~ A story of Innocence. 

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Steven Truscott ~ A story of Innocence. 

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This short clip is a summarization of how Steven Truscott was convicted of the rape and murder of his classmate, 12-year-old, Lynne Harper. The video starts from the day he was convicted, to the day he was arrested, to the day when he was put on parole, and finally, to the day the Ontario Court of Appeal cleared Steven Truscott of all charges. This is a great short clip that summarizes the story of Steven Truscott, and it is a great tool to use as an introduction on the story of Mr. Truscott. The video is intense, emotional, and shows real-life photos of Mr. Truscott.

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A Filmforce Original Documentary Editing, Narration & Music by Evan Stephens

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This photo was taken of Steven Truscott back in 2012, as a Toronto Star reporter visited one of Canada’s most famous victims of being wrongfully convicted. Like most articles that reminisce on Truscott’s past, this Toronto Star article talks about another battle that Mr. Truscott is going through. At the time that this photo was taken, Mr. Truscott was battling prostate cancer, yet, another battle for his life. Steve Truscott stated to the Toronto Star, “Worrying about it isn’t going to make it go away, I figured if the government couldn’t get rid of me, this wasn’t going to get rid of me either.”