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Post subject: 48 Years Later...
 Posted: Aug 29, 2007 - 04:29 PM
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Member
Joined: Feb 04, 2003
Posts: 3281
Location: 45°28' N 73°45' W
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http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news ... mp;k=42414
48 years later, Truscott acquitted of girl's murder
Kelly Patrick, CanWest News Service
Published: Tuesday, August 28, 2007
TORONTO - Steven Truscott, sentenced at age 14 to hang for a murder he has always said he did not commit, has at last been acquitted of the 1959 killing of Lynne Harper.
"I never in my wildest dreams expected in my lifetime for this to come true," Truscott, 62, told a packed news conference in Toronto. "So this is a dream come true."
In a unanimous 303-page decision released Tuesday, the Ontario Court of Appeal concluded the pillars of the original case against Truscott had collapsed under the weight of fresh evidence unearthed in the last decade.
Steven Truscott .
Steven Truscott .
CNS file photo
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The court threw out his conviction and, after deciding it would be impossible to order a new trial 48 years after Harper's death, entered an acquittal.
"The appellant (Truscott) in this case served 10 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," the court wrote.
While the acquittal is a victory for Truscott, the five judges presiding over the case stopped short of satisfying his lawyers' plea to declare Truscott innocent.
"The appellant (Truscott) has not demonstrated his factual innocence," the judges wrote. "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."
Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant said the Crown would not appeal the ruling.
He has asked retired Judge Sydney L. Robins to advise him on compensating Truscott for the time he spent behind bars and the decades he lived with the stigma of a murder conviction.
Although Truscott said he had not yet thought about asking the government for money, one of his lawyers, James Lockyer, said Truscott deserves to be richly compensated.
"My own view is that Steve should get every penny he can out of the government," Lockyer said.
Bryant also apologized on behalf of the Ontario government. Truscott rejected the gesture.
"I don't really feel that the apology was sincere," he said. "For the past 4 1/2 years, they've had the same evidence as what the judges have had and they chose to fight us every step of the way."
Tuesday's decision was the culmination of Truscott's lifelong quest to clear his name. It also marked the end of his modern legal saga, which began in August 1997 when the Guelph, Ont., millwright approached the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted for help digging up DNA evidence that might exonerate him.
The married father of three found out about Tuesday's acquittal as he and his family drove to Toronto.
Lockyer and Philip Campbell, another of Truscott's lawyers, called their client with the news and put him on speakerphone.
"The first word out of Steve's mouth was, 'oh,'" Campbell explained. "And then James explained a little more and finally he started saying 'fantastic.'"
Truscott's daughter, Lesley, said her mother, Marlene, "immediately started crying," while Lesley snapped pictures of the scene in the car.
"I was just elated," Truscott later told the news conference. "What (Lockyer) said didn't immediately sink in because I was prepared for the worst, which has happened every time in the past. It took a few miles for it to kind of sink in."
Truscott was barely a teenager when he was sentenced to hang for the rape and murder of Harper, who vanished from a Clinton, Ont., air force base June 9, 1959. Authorities found her body two days later in a wooded grove near the base. She had been strangled with her blouse.
"The most important thing is Steven Truscott went to bed last night a convicted murderer and this morning he's been acquitted," said Julian Sher, the author of Until You are Dead, an investigative book about the Truscott case. "His father's not here to see it, but his mother is still there, his family is still there, his children are still there."
The court's decision systematically dismantled the Crown's case against the teenager at his 1959 trial in Goderich, Ont.
Among the most damaging evidence against Truscott was the testimony of Dr. John Penistan, the pathologist who conducted the autopsy on Harper's body.
Based largely on the state of the girl's stomach contents, he testified that Harper died between 7 p.m. and 7:45 p.m. the night she disappeared.
Truscott admitted to giving her a lift on his bike during that period; had the timing been correct, Truscott was almost certainly Harper's killer.
Truscott's current legal team called expert witnesses who decried using stomach contents as a reliable guide to time of death.
The judges also concluded that new bug evidence helped tug Harper's likely time of death outside the 45-minute window.
The lesions found on Truscott's penis a few days after the murder made up another category of damaging evidence. The Crown in 1959 argued the wounds were evidence of Truscott having clumsily raped a small girl.
At the judicial review, Truscott's lawyers said the sores were caused by a pre-existing skin condition.
The judges agreed. "The penis lesions evidence that so vividly demonstrated (Truscott's) guilt at trial has been weakened to the extent that it is virtually no evidence at all."
Despite the collapse of the 1959 case, the court declined to blame the police or anyone else for sending Truscott to prison for 10 years.
That is disappointing, Sher said.
Truscott, who legally changed his last name to his mother's maiden name when he left prison in 1969, said he hopes the government will return his last name with no fuss. And he said he and his family are ready to keep looking forward, as he said they have done for years.
"(Trial and death sentence) get vaguer and vaguer every. I've learned the only way to survive is you move on. My family and I have moved on." |
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