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Over the years, Canada has been involved some major wrongful conviction cases. Prior to 2016 their have been at least 70 recorded instances of wrongful convictions in Canada. Some of the victims that have been involved with the largest wrongful convictions in Canada include Steven Truscott, Robert Baltovich, and David Milgaard in which all three of them were wrongfully convicted of murders they did not commit. The link below explains more in depth about wrongful conviction cases that have occurred in Canada.

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Those lyrics are specifcally about David Milgaard, a former Winnipeg man who was wrongfully imprisoned for 23 years for the rape and murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller in 1969.

Ten Tragically Hip albums later, "Wheat Kings" remains a painful reminder of Canada's long history of imprisoning innocent people. But on the eve of the band's (unofficially) final tour with Downie, following the front man's terminal brain cancer diagnosis, has Canada improved on its record of wrongful convictions since the debut of "Wheat Kings"?

From Milgaard, to James Driskell, Donald Marshall Jr., Erin Walsh, and hosts of others who were wrongly convicted and imprisoned, Canada has a long, painful history of putting the wrong people behind bars.

Every year, eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, jailhouse informant testimony, police and prosecutorial misconduct, and other contributing factors continue to send countless innocent people to prison.

"The issue of wrongful convictions is still a serious problem," Hersh Wolch, Milgaard's Calgary-based lawyer who helped exonerate the formerly accused murderer and rapist, told VICE.

Wolch, who has since made a name for himself overturning high-profile wrongful convictions in Canada, has represented the likes of Steven Truscott, Kyle Unger, Steven Kaminski, among others.

But long before Wolch gained notriety as Canada's go-to exoneration lawyer, Milgaard was a 16-year-old teenager facing life behind bars.

When Miller, a Saskatoon nurse, was discovered partially nude in a back alley near her home, stabbed 14 times, her throat slit, Milgaard was passing through Saskatchewan on a road trip. Saskatoon police interviewed hundreds of potential suspects but eventually pinned the crime on Milgaard after one of his friends reported him to police for acting strangely on the day of Miller's murder.
The accusation was baseless, yet in 1970, Milgaard was sentenced to life in prison, despite no real evidence linking Milgaard to the crime.

Milgaard always maintained his innocence, but despite this, spent decades behind bars. He was finally freed in 1992 after Ron Wilson, Milgaard's former friend, recanted his witness testimony forcing the Crown to enter a stay of proceedings. DNA forensics fully exonerated Milgaard in 1997 and the government awarded him $10 million in compensation two years later.

Forensics revealed that Larry Fisher, a serial rapist, and former neighbor of Gail Miller, was the killer. Fisher had been questioned by Saskatoon police at the time of Miller's slaying, but wasn't on their radar as a suspect. Fisher was convicted in Milgaard's place and died in an Abbotsford, BC federal prison in 2015.

"We often hear the comment that we have the greatest justice system in the world. I don't know where we get that from or why we say that when in actual fact there are innocent people behind bars," Wolch said.

There are currently at least 70 recorded instances of wrongful convictions, and 12 suspected cases in Canada according to Kathryn Campbell, author of forthcoming book, Miscarriages of Justice in Canada: Causes, Responses, Remedies.

Campbell, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa and director of Innocence Ottawa, a student-run non-profit that investigates wrongful convictions (similar to the Innocence Project in the US), said these cases account for crimes dating back to 1959.

But it's difficult, if not impossible, she said, to quantify if Canada's rate of wrongful convictions has increased or decreased since the 90s.

"This is a very rough estimate and these are only the known cases," said Campbell. "There are likely hundreds or even thousands more we don't know about."

What has changed, though, in the decades since Milgaard's exoneration and the release of "Wheat Kings," is the Canadian public's perception of wrongful convictions.

"The authorities and the public were not used to [wrongful convictions]," said Wolch, who explained that bringing a wrongful conviction before the courts mere decades ago was almost unheard of.

Today, though, Wolch said, the idea that someone could be wrongly convicted is much more accepted than it was in Milgaard's heyday.

The DNA forensic profiling boom of the 1980s and 90s helped change that, and brought more cases like Milgaard's to light. This advance, coupled with widespread media coverage of other high profile cases helped foster a sense of acceptance amongst the courts and public that wrongful convictions do happen.

But "Wheat Kings," too, might have played a role in facilitating this ideological shift towards wrongful convictions-at least amongst Hip fans, especially younger generations, many of whom might never have heard of Milgaard otherwise.

"It's undeniable that the narrative and the moral drawn in 'Wheat Kings' by the Tragically Hip served to educate and consequently raise consciousness amongst a significant number of their fans with regards to the justice system, the potential errors it can make, and the travesty of human rights that can result," Rob Bowman, a popular music scholar at York University, told VICE.

Wolch, Milgaard's lawyer, agreed that "Wheat Kings" had a seismic impact in that regard, too.

"It's very difficult to speak out on things like that," said Wolch. "It was very assuring when a group that popular would actually go out and do something like that. I think it's brought the message home to a lot of people-the message that people can be wrongfully convicted and when you are, don't give up-fight on."
READ MORE: How I Learned to Love the Tragically Hip and Still Be Punk
"Wheat Kings" even struck a chord in Milgaard himself.

"David [Milgaard] and his family were really touched by it at the time and it gave him hope, and spirit, cheered him up, and showed them the public was behind [them]," said Wolch.

Yet, despite a shift in public attitude towards wrongful imprisonment and advances in DNA forensic technology that have helped exonerate dozens of people, Canada's track record on wrongful convictions is still far from perfect, which is why "Wheat Kings" is as enduring-and vital-as when it was released, nearly 25 years ago.

"There's no end in sight, certainly," said Ronald Dalton, who spent more than a decade in prison after he had been wrongfully convicted for killing his wife in Newfoundland in the 1980s.

Dalton, who is also vice president of Innocence Canada, an organization devoted to rectifying and exposing wrongful convictions in Canada said his group has helped exonerate 21 people and is currently reviewing roughly 90 more cases of suspected wrongful conviction.

"As long as we have a system comprised of humans who make mistakes, I think there's always going to be wrongful convictions," he added.

The sentiment is echoed by Milgaard's lawyer.

"We still overlook quite a few [wrongful convictions] and people sit in jail who are innocent. It's a very difficult problem," Wolch said. "We are far from perfect."

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How Canada's Record of Wrongful Imprisonment Has Changed Since 'Wheat Kings'

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Those lyrics are specifcally about David Milgaard, a former Winnipeg man who was wrongfully imprisoned for 23 years for the rape and murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller in 1969. Ten Tragically Hip albums later, "Wheat Kings" remains a painful reminder of Canada's long history of imprisoning innocent people.

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The main three reasons as to why wrongful conviction cases occur is due to faulty eyewitness identification, police and prosecutorial tunnel vision, and over-reliance on scientifically questionable evidence. Not only in Canada but all around the world, wrongful conviction cases are happening and will continue to happen due to these three reasons. The link below gives a thorough explanation on all of the reasoning behind wrongful convictions.

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Wrongful Convictions | The Canadian Encyclopedia

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History, politics, arts, science & more: the Canadian Encyclopedia is your reference on Canada. Articles, timelines & resources for teachers, students & public.

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This video explains how race can be a factor associated with the wrongful conviction of a person

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New Report Examines The Role Race Plays In Wrongful Convictions & Exonerations

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The 5 Worst And Most Tragic Wrongful Conviction Cases I 

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The 5 Worst And Most Tragic Wrongful Conviction Cases I 

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Below is a video that explains 5 of the worst and most tragic wrongful conviction cases that have happened in the world. It is a very interesting and informative video on several wrongful conviction cases that have happened outside of Canada.

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5 Worst & Most Tragic Cases of Wrongful Conviction in History

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Eyewitness Identifictions Being Unreliable Video

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Eyewitness Identifictions Being Unreliable Video

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Below is a video that explains how eyewitness identifications lead to wrongful convictions.

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Eyewitness Identifications Lead to Wrongful Convictions

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In 1969 when David was 16, he was charged in the sex slaying of a nurse named Gail Miller. Gail was raped, stabbed to death and left in a snow bank. After the murder David went on a trip with his friends where they though David was acting weird plus he has blood stains on his shirt. His friends contacted police in which the police then interviewed David and he said he had nothing to do with the murder. Then in May, investigators began hearing reports that David had entertained his friends in a hotel room by re-enacting the Miller murder. He was then charged with first-degree murder on May 30, 1969. He spent 23 years in jail until he was freed because he was wrongfully convicted. Below is a picture of David now

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In 1959,when Steven was 14 years old, he gave his schoolmate/friend Lynn Harper a ride on his bicycle near in the area they were from. Two days later her body was found in a grove near the town they were from and she had been raped and strangled to death. A 15 day trial then occurred and Steven Truscott was convicted of murder and he became Canada’s youngest death-row inmate. His death sentence was then commuted in which he spent a decade in prison before being paroled in 1969. Then On Aug 28, 2007, the Ontario Court overturned his conviction, declaring the case “a miscarriage of justice” that “must be quashed” and the Ontario Government then awarded him $6.5 million in compensation for everything he went through. Below is a picture of Steven now.

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Robert Baltovich is an example of a popular wrongful conviction that took place in Canada.He was 25 years old when he was wrongfully convicted for the murder of his girlfriend Elizabeth Bain in 1990. He spent eight years in prison and nearly another 10 years trying to clear his name before being found not guilty in a retrial on April 22, 2008.

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This article below does a really good job explaining Steven Truscott's wrongful conviction from beginning to end. Explaining key facts and information this article is very informative on this case and what happened year by year during this mans unfortunate time in life when he was convicted for the murder of his friend

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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.

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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.