Opinion: Canadians languishing in jail with little to no chance of a successful appeal will have new hope if Parliament does the right thing and passes Bill C\u002D40.
So while no crime was committed, there was a victim: Bill himself. Bill had become a victim of a system that rarely acknowledges its own errors, and of the disgraced former pathologist Charles Smith, whose shoddy work resulted in the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of at least 13 people, most of them women who had lost their infants to natural causes.
The trouble, of course, is that wrongful convictions are usually conceived of as cases of mistaken identity — the police finger the wrong person, who is ultimately exonerated when DNA evidence proves he wasn’t even at the scene of the crime. Since the registry only includes cases in which people received remedies from the criminal justice system, it barely scratches the surface of the problem. No one knows just how many Canadians are languishing in jail for crimes that never occurred, or because they pled guilty to avoid life sentences.
Just days before the registry was launched, Attorney-General David Lametti tabled Bill C-40, the Miscarriage of Justice Review Commission Act. If passed, the act will create an independent commission to review wrongful conviction applications.
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