# data[].attributes.headline
Truscott supporters wanted for documentary

# data[].attributes.subject
Truscott supporters wanted for documentary

# data[].attributes.body
This image is from an article detailing a high school teacher making a documentary about how the students of Humberview put in massive amounts of effort to come to the defense of Steven Truscott. The teacher, George Allain, was relying partially on a Kickstarter campaign to fund the film, and would interview all kinds of supporters of Truscott, and Allain tried to involve as many former Humberview students as possible.

# data[].attributes.body
This image is from a collection of images related to the Truscott case, including several pictures of Truscott as he was brought into court, and several pictures of the crime scene and investigation.

# data[].attributes.body
This video from CBC is from their show, the Fifth Estate. This episode focuses on Steven Truscott and highlights issues with the forensic evidence as well as show that the police rushed to arrest him and ignored testimony. This video was very important as it led to Steven's family to launch a campaign to prove his innocence.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Steven Truscott - His Word Against History - the fifth estate

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It was a hot, muggy evening in 1959 when 14-year-old Steven Truscott gave his schoolmate Lynn Harper a ride on his bicycle near an air force base outside Clinton, Ontario. Two days later, the girl's body was found in a wooded grove near the town. She had been raped and strangled.

# data[].attributes.body
This website focuses more on Lynn Harper's murder and really focuses in on the trial, really going in depth on how the trial progressed, the different testimony, and how certain attributes played large parts in the trial. The website also talks about the different media that have come out regarding Steven Truscott. It talks about the book written about his story, as well as the play Innocence Lost, which also talks about Steven's story.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Lynne Harper was a middle child: she had one older brother and one younger. She was small for her age. She was born in New Brunswick, but because her father was in the Air Force, she moved around the country a lot. In 1959, when she was twelve, Harper lived on an Air Force base in Clinton, Ontario, a small town near London. She made lots of friends there-she was an energetic kid, a quality that led some people, looking back later, to describe her as a live wire. Others called her bossy. She was a Girl Guide, and she liked playing baseball. She had crushes on boys in her class and was occasionally self-conscious about a scar on her face from a childhood accident. Sometimes she argued with her parents.

In June of 1959, two months before her thirteenth birthday, Harper was found dead in the woodlot of a farm in her neighbourhood. She had been raped. Her body was covered in cuts and bruises, and the cause of death was strangulation. Four days later, Harper's schoolmate Steven Truscott, a soft-spoken and well-liked fourteen-year-old, was arrested for her murder and sentenced to death by hanging. His sentence was eventually commuted to life in prison, and he was later released on parole before his conviction was overturned in 2007. Harper's murder remains unsolved.

Murder trials boil down to observable facts-concrete certainties that have been witnessed and recorded to the satisfaction of a judge and jury. The kind of minutia that otherwise gets lost in the course of an average day-the exact time you left your house (down to the minute!) or the exact colour of car you think you saw your friend walk up to-is elevated to the realm of vital importance. The words we use to describe a conviction or an alibi are words of substance and solidity: strong, bulletproof, iron-clad. The way we talk about a murder charge is at odds with realm of fiction, which is often about ambiguity, emotional states that can't be easily defined. But when Beverley Cooper wrote Innocence Lost: A Play About Steven Truscott, ambiguity was her chief concern. She believes Truscott was innocent, but the play isn't really a story about that. It's about how the community changed after a child was killed and another child was charged with her murder.

Cooper says her friend Ann-Marie MacDonald's Giller-nominated novel The Way the Crow Flies, also loosely based on Harper and Truscott, served as an inspiration for her when Eric Coates at the Blyth Festival asked her to write a play about the case. She also says she enjoyed the Netflix show Manhunt: Unabomber, a fictionalized take on the FBI's search for Oklahoma City bomber Ted Kaczynski. "I'm kind of fascinated and yet cautious of that genre," Cooper says.

Fiction about a real-world tragedy risks sensationalizing the events that remain painful for a lot of people. But they also provide the opportunity to explore human behaviour, to directly address the impacts of violence and trauma. "I think what interests me is not necessarily the crime-I'm not really interested in gruesome crime-but what I am interested in is the social implications," Cooper says. What fascinated her about this case, she explains, is the effect it had on the community: a small town rocked by unexpected violence, trying to cope with grief and tragedy, divided by what many people saw as competing loyalties to two families suddenly at odds with one another.

The charges against Truscott were laid in large part because everyone agreed he was one of the last people to see Harper alive. He had given her a ride on the handlebars of his bike on the warm June night she disappeared; an immaculate illustration of childhood innocence for two people who didn't know their childhoods were about to end. (In a rare televised interview from 2015, producers on The Fifth Estate got Truscott to ride by the same area as that fateful bike journey decades earlier. The image was haunting in its mundanity: there's nothing shocking about a middle-aged man riding a bike until you think about who is no longer there.)

Much of the testimony in Truscott's murder trial came from children, a detail that seems directly lifted from Lillian Hellman's 1934 play The Children's Hour. Many of them gave conflicting accounts, either because they were vindictive or just plain mistaken. The prosecution's "star witnesses" were Jocelyne Gaudet and Arnold "Butch" George, schoolmates of Harper and Truscott. Both were preteens and both changed their stories to police several times, but neither of those facts stopped prosecutors from putting them on the stand. Neither one has spoken to the press as an adult. But several nurses who trained at St. Mary's Hospital in Montreal in the 1960s say they knew a woman who called herself Kim, but who everyone knew was actually Gaudet. One nurse said in a signed affidavit that Gaudet had lied on the stand and knew Truscott to be innocent.

The fact that so many kids were involved in the trial was another element that was deeply interesting to Cooper. Her son was fourteen when she started writing the play, and she says she remembers looking at him and thinking: How could it happen? "If you think back on a summer night when you were thirteen or fourteen, could you remember exactly where you were or what you did the night before?" she asks. "Something like sixty-one kids were interviewed that night. ' Where were you, and what did you see? ' The impact of that on the kids, that one of their classmates could be found raped and murdered, and then the guy that they looked up to as the popular jock is charged with her murder-that kind of fascinated me."

The other big driver of Truscott's conviction, besides child testimonials, came from science that has since been debunked. Dr. John Penistan, the pathologist who examined Harper's body, said he could isolate the time of her murder to between 7:15 p.m. and 7:45 p.m., which a doctor named John Butt told The Fifth Estate is an impossible deduction. (Stomach contents tell doctors "nothing precise," about the time of death, Butt said.) But at the time of the trial, it was enough.

One of the most significant people in the Truscott saga, and one who figures prominently in Innocence Lost, is the late journalist Isabel LeBourdais. She had travelled from Toronto to Clinton in the early '60s to write a story about the case for Chatelaine, but became so wrapped up it that the article became a book. The Trial of Steven Truscott, published in 1966, was the first major work arguing that Truscott had been wrongfully convicted.

That book is one of many that Cooper read in preparation to write the play. Innocence Lost is meticulously researched, and the majority of the lines that are attributed to real people-like Doris Truscott, Steven's mother-are either direct quotes Cooper found in the historical record or sentiments she knows the real person expressed. LeBourdais is an exception: her character in the play interacts with characters Cooper made up, so some of her dialogue is imagined. All of Detective Inspector Graham's lines, Cooper says, come from speeches or interviews he actually gave.

At the time of Truscott's conviction, some people-even the ones who didn't doubt that a fourteen-year-old was physically capable of murder by strangulation, like LeBourdais did-rejected the idea that a minor should be hanged. Others, including Harper's family, believed Truscott did commit the crime and saw doubt in the conviction as an insult to her memory. "Boy seems so calm and normal, but is he savage murderer?" a Toronto Telegram headline asked. When Toronto Star columnist Pierre Berton wrote a poem decrying the decision to put a fourteen-year-old child to death, he received death threats of his own. "A hanging is too good for him," Berton reports being told by one letter-writer in the Fifth Estate episode about the case. Another person phoned him to say: "I hope your daughter is raped."

Wanting someone to blame after such a horrific event is an instinct Cooper investigates in the play, rather than outright condemns. Harper's death was so shocking, and she was killed in a way that was so gruesome, that it was natural for Clinton residents to find comfort in identifying the supposed perpetrator. "I can totally understand that rush to judgment," Cooper says. "You so want them to catch the killer right away so that you can breathe again. And if you have children who are the same age, you're terrified." She recognizes that instinct in her own reaction to alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur, who police have charged with eight murders in the area of Toronto's Gay Village. "I believe that guy's guilty," Cooper says. "He hasn't had a trial yet, but I'm pretty certain he's guilty. And we want to believe he's guilty, because we want whoever it is who's doing these horrible things to have been caught."

More than just the killing itself, Cooper sees Truscott's story as a loss in faith in institutions that, in the '50s, many Canadians still saw as faultless. In The Trial of Steven Truscott, LeBourdais wrote that "most of us give very little thought to the manner in which justice is administered. We leave it to the police, the magistrates, the judges, and others involves in judicial processes." But when it's a crime news story, and someone gets arrested, people are usually only slightly interested. "We usually take it for granted that the accused is guilty or the police would not have arrested him. We thoughtlessly line ourselves up with the police as judge, jury and even executioner."

The continued and contemporary need to be vigilant about our justice system is something that came up often in the play's rehearsal hall with director Jackie Maxwell, Cooper says. We are still learning about institutional problems that disproportionately punish certain groups while criminalizing others, she says, pointing to the recent acquittal of Gerald Stanley, the farmer who fatally shot twenty-two-year-old Indigenous man Colten Boushie in Saskatchewan. (Boushie's family has recently asked the UN to investigate systemic bias in the way law is enforced in Canada.) "Our justice system is enforced by humans, and humans are by nature fallible," Cooper adds.

Cooper met Truscott briefly when he came to see the play during the last show of its run at Blyth. Just before the play started, a girl who looked about twelve went up to Truscott and asked for his autograph. His legacy, though, remains mixed: Cooper says a previous artistic director at Blyth received death threats when he suggested a play about the case. For her part, Cooper was impressed by Truscott. "He was so gracious, and so polite, and kind of shy," Cooper remembers. "I found it so incredible that he could go through all this and not be bitter." He rarely gives interviews, and has since changed his name. He has a wife and grown children, and is now a grandfather.

Over the years, many other people have been considered as possible suspects in Harper's murder. In Until You Are Dead: Steven Truscott's Long Ride into History, author Julian Sher lists suspects, including an Air Force sergeant named Alexander Kalichuk, who had been caught trying to lure a ten-year-old girl into his car the month before Lynne was killed. Police never considered him a suspect. Clayton Dennis, an electrician on the Air Force base who was a convicted rapist, was never questioned by police. Matthew Meron, a lifeguard who was nineteen at the time of Harper's death, later sexually abused his young daughters and tried to strangle one of them. And several years ago, retired Ontario Provincial Police officer Barry Ruhl published a book called A Viable Suspect about a different man, whose real name he doesn't use, a suspect in an unsolved early '70s murder of a teenage girl. "We've got all sorts of cold cases in Ontario," Ruhl told a Guelph Mercury reporter in 2014.

For Cooper, a major priority was making sure Harper isn't forgotten from the play. It was important to her that a young girl play Harper for the few scenes she has in the play, rather than an adult actress. "When you see that innocence in that child, it hopefully has some resonance," Cooper says. She wants Harper's casting to be "a reminder to us that this did happen to somebody so young, and that it was a very tragic thing. I think we can get lost in details of legal stuff and crime stories.

"It always seems so cold when they tell it-the newspapers, and then lawyers and then the books. Like her death was just a pile of details to be examined," says one of the characters in the play. "She was a living, breathing twelve-year-old child. She was a good girl."

Maija is the co-founder and former co-editor of Intermission. She'd like you to know that her name is pronounced just like "Maya."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Intermission | Telling the Story of the Murder Trial that Changed the Country

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lynne Harper was a middle child: she had one older brother and one younger. She was small for her age. She was born in New Brunswick, but because her father was in the Air Force, she moved around the country a lot.

# data[].attributes.body
This website also tells the full story of Steven Truscott, but it tells it in more of a timeline way. It goes through the story like a timeline, moving through the years, and going in depth on each stage of his story. It highlights key events, people, dates, and talks about what happened after he was freed from prison and his compensation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For nearly five decades, Steven Truscott lived under the shadow of a wrongful murder conviction.

Steven Murray Truscott was a popular, athletic teenager who lived with his parents in the southwestern Ontario town of Clinton. In 1959, at the age of 14, he was wrongly convicted of killing his 12-year-old schoolmate Lynne Harper. Not until five decades later was he finally exonerated.

Lynne Harper Murder

On the evening of 9 June 1959 several witnesses saw Steven Truscott cycling with Lynne Harper through the countryside - Truscott carrying her on the handlebars of his bicycle. Two days later, the girl's remains were found just off a tractor trail in a lightly wooded area known as Lawson's Bush, on the outskirts of Clinton.

Truscott became an immediate suspect. Questioned by police, he maintained that he had given the girl a lift to a highway intersection approximately a kilometre west of town, where some believe Lynne intended to hitch a ride to her grandmother's home in a nearby community. Police found details of his account deceptive and promptly arrested Truscott for murder.

With a population of just 3,500, Clinton - located near Lake Huron about 200 km west of Toronto - was divided evenly between long-time local residents and military families who worked at Canadian Forces Base Clinton, a nearby radar-training base. Both the Truscott and Harper families belonged to the military community.

Steven Truscott, born in Vancouver on 18 January 1945, was the son of a non-commissioned air force officer, Dan, and his wife Doris. They had arrived in Clinton in 1956, a year before the Harper family was transferred there.

The abduction and murder traumatized the community to a point where Truscott was denied bail. The Crown also succeeded in having his upcoming trial transferred to adult court, ensuring that Truscott could be potentially sentenced to either life imprisonment or execution.

Trial and Conviction

Truscott's jury trial consumed 15 days. The prosecution case was based on an assertion that Harper was a cautious girl who did not hitchhike. It alleged that Truscott sexually assaulted Harper, strangled her with her blouse and then arranged a few tree branches to partially cover her remains.

The prosecution highlighted a series of seemingly inconsistent statements Truscott had made in his statements to police, as well as the existence of a mysterious abrasion on his penis. It also questioned why Truscott did not reveal until at least a day after Harper disappeared that he had seen her get into a Chevrolet at the spot where her left her on Highway 8. Finally, it cited evidence that fresh bicycle tire tracks were found leading along the tractor path to the body site.

Mr. Truscott's defence lawyer, Frank Donnelly, maintained that the victim dismounted from Mr. Truscott's handlebars hundreds of metres past the entrance to the tractor trail where her body had been found, making it most unlikely that he had taken her all the way back to the tractor trail site in order to kill her.

Truscott repeated his assertion to police that he had seen Lynne picked up by a 1959 Chevrolet with an out-of-province licence plate.

Timing was critical to the case. Pathologist John Penistan, who conducted an autopsy of the victim, testified that her half-digested stomach contents revealed that Lynne had died between 7:15 p.m. -7:45 p.m. This narrow window of opportunity proved to be damning evidence against Truscott, since it was certain that he had been with her during that time. The brief window also lessened the possibility of a stranger having picked Lynne up on the highway and driven her back across the bridge toward the tractor path where she died.

The trial featured a good deal of testimony from children who had been playing under the bridge that evening and saw Truscott with Harper. Both the Crown and defence used the children's accounts to bolster their own contentions about the timing of events.

Truscott was found guilty on 30 September 1959. His conviction and the imposition of a death sentence caused a significant public clamour. A year later, the federal government commuted his sentence to life imprisonment with a 10-year parole eligibility period. Truscott's subsequent appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada was rejected.

Truscott Paroled

In 1966, a book by Isabel LeBourdais stirred up controversy anew. The Trial of Steven Truscott made a detailed case for the young man having been railroaded by careless police officers and a vindictive prosecution. LeBourdais was particularly critical of Dr. Penistan's conclusions, and of apparent discrepancies with the evidence gathered by Ontario Provincial Police investigators. She was also critical of the manner in which statements from underage witnesses were obtained and used by the Crown.

A special reference to the Supreme Court of Canada led to the case being re-examined in 1966; however, the Supreme Court ruled that his case had been justly decided.

Truscott was paroled in 1969 and disappeared into anonymity. For almost 30 years, he lived under the media radar in Guelph, Ontario. His identity was known only to some members of the community and to his co-workers at a company where Truscott was employed as a millwright. To the outside world, he was known only by his assumed name, Steven Bowers.

AIDWYC Investigates

Under Section 690 of the Criminal Code, Truscott could apply to have his conviction reviewed and potentially referred for a retrial. First, however, the Department of Justice had to be satisfied that fresh evidence in the case could affect the outcome of his trial.

Lawyers from the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC) dug into the background of the case, eventually obtaining 3,000 pages of material not before disclosed to the defence. The group drafted a 700-page brief that raised multiple instances of evidence that, according to AIDWYC, hadn't been adequately investigated or had been improperly suppressed.

At the same time, AIDWYC lawyers worked with the CBC program The Fifth Estate to stoke public interest about the long-ago case. A producer at the program, Julian Sher, also produced a book, Until You Are Dead, arguing for Truscott's innocence.

The thrust of the fresh evidence was that the Crown had suppressed information from children that could have been used by the defence to confirm Truscott's claim that he rode across the bridge and left Harper at Highway 8.

The defence had also obtained a previously undisclosed police report showing that the bicycle tire tracks on the tractor trail were likely to have been left there at least a week before Harper was killed, rendering them meaningless as evidence.

Pathologist's Letter

Perhaps the most significant new evidence was the discovery of a letter Dr. Penistan had written in 1966 to the lead police investigator in the case, Harold Graham. Sent on the eve of the 1966 Supreme Court of Canada appeal, Penistan admitted in the letter that he had made an "agonizing reappraisal" of his testimony at the Truscott trial and concluded that he should not have supplied such a narrow window-of-time opportunity.

The letter had never been disclosed to the defence.

A final item of undisclosed evidence involved an elderly couple who had told investigators soon after the murder that they had spotted a young girl hitchhiking, around the spot Truscott claimed to have left Harper that night, at roughly the time she disappeared.

Truscott's lawyers put forward an alternative suspect in the murder - a one-time air force sergeant named Alexander Kalichuk, who had been transferred away from Clinton two years before the Harper murder but had maintained links with the community. Kalichuk had been arrested in St. Thomas, Ontario, three weeks prior to the Harper murder, for attempting to lure a young girl into his car.

The failure to disclose evidence that was potentially favourable to Truscott was not illegal under rules and conventions existing at the time. However, much had changed in the years since then. The Supreme Court of Canada, in a landmark 1991 case known as R v Stinchcombe, had ruled that there was a constitutional obligation on the part of the state to disclose potentially relevant evidence to a defendant.

Appeal and Acquittal

In 2002, the federal government appointed retired Québec Court of Appeal Justice Fred Kaufman to review Truscott's Section 690 application. Kaufman, who had earlier presided over an inquiry into the wrongful conviction of Guy Paul Morin, recommended that the Ontario Court of Appeal reopen the Truscott case to permit a full appeal. The federal minister of justice agreed.

A special five-judge panel of the Court of Appeal began hearing the fresh evidence in mid-2006. A year later, it acquitted Truscott outright, in part because it said a fair retrial would be impossible so many years after the fact.

In media interviews, Truscott recalled waking up every morning of his initial period behind bars wondering if he would be executed before the day was out. He also said that he had been drugged with LSD and truth serum during his incarceration by authorities in the hope that it would induce him to confess.

"I'm not bitter," Truscott told journalists. "You can't live day after day being bitter . . . I've moved on with my life. My wife and I raised a family. I was always taught to look at things positively."

Meanwhile, Lynne Harper's father maintained that he and other close family members were skeptical of Truscott's innocence.

Steven Truscott and AIDWYC member Julien LeBourdais. For nearly five decades, Truscott lived under the shadow of a wrongful murder conviction, before being exonerated.

Truscott continues to live in Guelph with his wife, Marlene. He was awarded $6.5 million in compensation by the Ontario government in 2008, part of which Truscott used to launch the Truscott Initiative in Justice Studies at the University of Guelph, funding two scholarships for students in the field.

See also: Truscott's Quest for Vindication Continues.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For nearly five decades, Steven Truscott lived under the shadow of a wrongful murder conviction. Steven Murray Truscott was a popular, athletic teenager who lived with his parents in the southwestern Ontario town of Clinton. In 1959, at the age of 14, he was wrongly convicted of killing his 12-year-old schoolmate Lynne Harper.

# data[].attributes.body
An interview with Playwright Beverley Cooper, on her production "Innocence Lost," which tells Steven Truscott's story through the lens of an artistic production. This production helped people to understand the events of Truscott's conviction, and will bring his story to more people through the art of theater.

# data[].attributes.body
This website, Innocence Canada covers a brief summary of the crime that was committed, talks about the trials, talks about his life in prison, his freedom after many years, and the wounds that his time in prison has caused for him outside of prison. It covers Steven's whole story, and talks about the reasons for his wrongful conviction.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Author: Sarah Harland-Logan

Introduction

In 1959, Steven Truscott was only fourteen years old when he was charged with the murder of his classmate Lynne Harper. After his wrongful conviction, Steven spent nearly 50 years seeking justice before he was acquitted by the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2007.[1]

On the evening of June 9, 1959, Steven was seen giving Lynne a ride on his bicycle. They parted ways. Later that evening, her father reported her missing. Two days later, Lynne's body was found in a nearby wooded area. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death. On June 13, 1959, Steven was charged with Lynne's murder.[2]

Steven's Trial

Despite his young age, Steven was ordered to stand trial as an adult. The Crown's theory was that rather than dropping Lynne off as he claimed to have done, Steven turned off into the bush and killed Lynne at some point between 7:00 p.m. and 7:45 p.m. that evening. This theory was supported by conflicting testimony from various witnesses (some of whom claimed to have seen Steven near the area where Lynne's body was found), testimony from the autopsy doctor - Dr. John Penistan - that Lynne had died sometime within this window, and lesions on Steven's penis which, it was argued, could have been sustained by sexually assaulting Lynne.[3]

Steven insisted throughout the proceedings that he was innocent. He testified that Lynne was unharmed when he dropped her off at the intersection of the County Road and Highway 8, and that he happened to stop his bike on a bridge and looked back in her direction, only to see her getting into a grey Chevy with a yellow license plate. Several witnesses supported Steven's version of events, testifying that they had indeed seen Steven and Lynne riding toward the intersection where Steven said he had dropped her off, or that they had seen him standing on the bridge looking in her direction. Witnesses also noted that Steven seemed normal when they saw him on the school grounds at 8 p.m. that evening. No one had seen Steven entering or leaving the wooded area where Lynne was killed.[4]

The defence led evidence from a specialist in internal medicine who testified that the method that the Crown expert used to determine Lynne's time of death - examination of stomach contents - was not reliable, and that the lesions on Steven's penis were most likely not caused by sexual intercourse.[5]

Despite defence efforts, on September 30, 1959, the jury found Steven guilty, and recommended that he be sentenced mercifully. At that time, however, the Criminal Code required that a death sentence be imposed for murder. The trial judge sentenced fourteen-year-old Steven to death by hanging.

No Appeals Allowed

Steven appealed his conviction to the Ontario Court of Appeal, but the Court unanimously dismissed his appeal on January 20, 1960. He then applied to the Supreme Court of Canada for leave to appeal his conviction. On February 24 of the same year, that court also dismissed his application for leave to appeal.[6]

At that point, Steven was out of legal options. Fortunately, the Governor General had ordered that his death sentence be commuted to a sentence of life imprisonment. Steven was therefore able to continue fighting for justice for several decades, rather than being executed for a crime he did not commit.[7]

Six years later, author Isabel LeBourdais published a book entitled The Trial of Steven Truscott, which was highly critical of the police investigation and trial process that had led to Steven's conviction. The book brought Steven's case to the attention of the public and, in 1966, the Governor General requested that the Supreme Court determine whether or not it would have upheld Steven's conviction if it had allowed him to appeal the trial court's decision. On May 4, 1967, the Court concluded that it would have dismissed the appeal. Again, it seemed that Steven was out of legal options.[8]

Steven's Incarceration and Life in the Community

Steven remained incarcerated - first at the Ontario Training School for Boys in Guelph, and then, after turning eighteen, at the Collins Bay Penitentiary, in Kingston - until October 21, 1969. At that point, he had been in prison for ten years and was eligible to be released on parole. After his release at age 24, Steven moved to Guelph, changed his name, and worked as a millwright, a trade that he had learned in prison. In October 1970, he married his wife, Marlene, and they raised three children. He has never been charged with any other criminal offence.[9]

Fresh Evidence Presented to the Court of Appeal

Innocence Canada (formerly AIDWYC) first became involved in Steven's case in 1997 when Innocence Canada Counsel, along with journalists from CBC's the fifth estate, travelled to Steven and Marlene's home in Guelph. Steven quickly gave instructions to commence a search for evidence that would establish his innocence once and for all.[10]

In 2001 - thirty years after Steven's release from prison - Innocence Canada prepared and submitted an Application for Ministerial Review of his conviction under what was then section 690 of the Criminal Code. As a result of this application, in 2002, the federal Minister of Justice retained Mr. Justice Fred Kaufman, a retired Justice of the Quebec Court of Appeal, to investigate the conviction.[11]

In April of 2004, Mr. Kaufman released his investigative report to the Minister of Justice. He had found that there was "clearly a reasonable basis for concluding that a miscarriage of justice ... likely occurred." In light of this alarming finding, the Minister of Justice referred the case back to the Court of Appeal, the same Court which had refused to hear Steven's appeal 1960.[12]

In June and July 2006, a five-judge panel of the Court of Appeal conducted a three-week hearing where Steven and his Innocence Canada Counsel - James Lockyer, Philip Campbell, Marlys Edwardh, Hersh Wolch and Jenny Friedland - called the fresh evidence that they believed would acquit him of Lynne's murder. They called several experts to testify that the lesions on Steven's penis were not caused by sexual intercourse with a young girl. Importantly, several medical experts gave testimony regarding the significant advancements that had occurred in scientific knowledge of the gastric emptying process (i.e., how quickly food is broken down in the stomach) between the time of Steven's trial in 1959 and the appeal 2006. These experts testified that at the time of Steven's trial, the field was still "in its infancy," whereas by 2006, scientists were aware that the rate at which stomachs empty varies widely and depends on a large number of factors (e.g., age, gender, diet, and stress level).[13]

One of the experts, Dr. Michael Pollanen, examined the notes taken at Lynne's autopsy as well as the slides containing samples of her preserved organs and tissues. Dr. Pollanen found that there was much less evidence of decomposition than he would have expected if Lynne's time of death was really between 7:00 p.m. and 7:45 p.m. on June 9, 1959 (i.e., two days before her autopsy). He concluded that Lynne had probably died sometime on June 10 th - when Steven could not possibly have killed her.[14]

Even more troubling, the Court of Appeal was provided with two unofficial versions of Lynne's autopsy report that had not been made available to the jurors during Steven's trial. One of these versions appears to have been the original version that was drafted during the autopsy. In this document, Dr. John Penistan expressed the opinion that Lynne's body was found "about 40 hours after death" - which would mean that Lynne had died at about 12:45 a.m. on the morning of June 10 th. Steven had an unchallenged alibi for this time period. The other unofficial version of the autopsy report gives Lynne's time of death as between 4:45 a.m. and 10:45 a.m. on June 10 th. In other words, if Lynne's death occurred during either of the timeframes that Dr. Penistan had originally noted, then Steven could not have been her killer.

In 1966, Dr. Penistan had submitted a review of his autopsy findings - which he described as an "agonizing reappraisal" - for the Supreme Court reference regarding Steven's conviction. This document was not disclosed to defence counsel or to the Supreme Court at the reference. Had they been privy to Dr. Penistan's review they would have learned that the Doctor concluded in 1966 that his findings were "not incompatible" with a later time of death than the definitive time window that he had given on the stand at Steven's trial in 1959.[15]

A Miscarriage of Justice

Following the hearing in 2006, the Court of Appeal concluded that if defence counsel had known about the uncertainty of the medical evidence surrounding Lynne's time of death, as well as the many times that Dr. Penistan changed his opinion in this regard, they would have cross-examined him on his conflicting opinions. Perhaps he would then have retracted his opinion that Lynne died during the time window that supported the Crown's theory that Steven had killed her. The Court found that given "the nature of the changes" in Dr. Penistan's opinion about Lynne's time of death, his evidence was "reasonably open to the allegation that his opinion shifted to coincide with the Crown's case." [16] In other words, it is possible that he testified to help the Crown get a conviction, instead of helping the Court to find the truth.

The Court of Appeal concluded that this fresh evidence could reasonably be expected to have affected the jury's verdict. In light of this fresh evidence, Steven's conviction was clearly a miscarriage of justice. On August 28, 2007, the Court of Appeal finally quashed his conviction, which had been in place for over 45 years, and entered an acquittal.[17] Soon afterward, the Attorney General for Ontario apologized to Steven.[18]

In 2008, the Ontario government - recognizing that Steven had not only spent a decade in prison for a crime he did not commit, but had also spent nearly half a century as an innocent man stigmatized as a rapist and murderer - awarded Steven $6.5 million in compensation for this egregious miscarriage of justice.[19]

The Causes of Steven's Wrongful Conviction

As in most wrongful conviction cases, several factors contributed to Steven's wrongful conviction. First, the Crown's failure to disclose the unofficial versions of Dr. Penistan's autopsy report in 1959, caused the defence counsel and jury members to miss crucial exonerating information. Second, the Crown's failure to disclose Dr. Penistan's "agonizing reappraisal" in 1966, similarly played a role in frustrating a much earlier attempt to overturn Steven's wrongful conviction.[20] The Supreme Court has since helped to prevent potential miscarriages of justice caused by a lack of disclosure, by setting out guidelines in the 1991 case R v Stinchcombe [1991] 3 SCR 326, clarifying that the Crown must disclose any and all relevant documents to the defence (except for a few types of privileged materials).

A third factor leading to Steven's wrongful conviction was the limited scientific knowledge available at the time. Scientific advancements in the intervening 45 years - most notably, a deeper understanding of the numerous factors that could affect the rate at which the stomach empties - shed light on problems with the Crown's case that were not evident at the time of Steven's trial. It is important to remember that Steven was originally sentenced to death, and he would have been executed many years before these scientific advancements had taken place. One of many reasons that Innocence Canada does not support the death penalty is that new scientific and technological developments have often played a key role in exonerating innocent people many years after they were imprisoned, as in Steven's case.[21]

A fourth factor in the wrongful conviction was that Dr. Penistan may have lost sight of his duty to play a dispassionate role in the court process, and help the trier of fact to seek the truth. His many shifting opinions about the time of Lynne's death suggest that he was so eager to convict Steven for this horrific crime that he allowed his medical judgment to be affected.

Another factor leading to Steven's wrongful conviction might have been that police and prosecutors focused too early on Steven as the only suspect in Lynne's murder; this phenomenon is known as "tunnel vision." The Court of Appeal did not decide whether or not Steven was unfairly targeted in this way. The Court did comment, however, that Steven's lawyers had argued that tunnel vision negatively affected his case. The Court also stated that "it is true ... that police 'tunnel vision' is a feature found in many miscarriages of justice."[22]

Wounds that Innocence Canada Cannot Heal

The Court of Appeal commented that Steven had spent "his entire adult life in the shadow" of his wrongful conviction.[23] In response to Steven being awarded $6.5 million in compensation, the Truscotts issued a statement explaining, "Although we are grateful for the freedom and stability this award will provide, we are also painfully aware that no amount of money could ever truly compensate Steven for the terror of being sentenced to hang at the age of 14, the loss of his youth or the stigma of living for almost 50 years as a convicted murderer."[24] It is extremely fortunate, and worthy of admiration, that Steven has been able to rebuild his life and start a family but the Truscotts will likely never be able to step out fully from the long, dark shadow of Steven's wrongful conviction.

[1] "Steven Truscott to get $6.5M for wrongful conviction: Sentenced to hang at age 14 for murdering classmate" CBC News (07 July 2008), online: CBC News Canada http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/steven-truscott-to-get-6-5m-for-wrongful-conviction-1.742381.

[2] Truscott (Re), 2007 ONCA 575, 225 CCC (3d) 321.

[6] Jay Makarenko, "Truscott Case: Background" Maple Leaf Web, online: http://www.mapleleafweb.com/old/education/spotlight/issue_59/background.html.

[7] Supra note 2.

[9] Supra note 6.

[10] R v Steven Truscott, 2007 ONCA 575 (Factum of the Appellant at para 14).

[11] Ibid at paras 15-18.

[12] Supra note 2.

[18] Supra note 1.

[20] Supra note 2.

[24] Supra note 1.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Author: Sarah Harland-Logan In 1959, Steven Truscott was only fourteen years old when he was charged with the murder of his classmate Lynne Harper. After his wrongful conviction, Steven spent nearly 50 years seeking justice before he was acquitted by the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2007.[1] On the evening of June 9, 1959, Steven was seen giving Lynne a ride on his bicycle.

# data[].attributes.body
This image is from an article explaining the deceptive practices in Truscott's trial, as well as the reopening of the case in 2001, which eventually cleared Truscott of all charges.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a short video, but it talks about the 6.5 million dollars given to Steven Truscott as compensation from the government for all the years he spent wrongfully convicted in prison for a murder he did not commit.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Steven Truscott's $6.5 Million Award for Wrongful Conviction