MONTREAL — Over the past year, a Quebec non-profit that advocates for the wrongfully convicted has convinced the federal justice minister to take a second look at two cases in which people have been declared guilty.
Project Innocence Quebec says its work led Justice Minister Arif Virani in April to order a new trial in the case of Claude Paquin, a Quebec man convicted of two counts of 1st-degree murder in 1983.
And in October, the organization was able to have the case of M.R., an individual convicted of sex assault against a minor, returned to Quebec Court of Appeal for a new appeal. Nicholas Saint-Jacques, vice-president of Innocence Quebec and a lecturer at the department of judicial sciences at Université du Québec à Montréal, says such decisions from the federal minister are rare and there are often only two of them per year.
Saint-Jacques says succeeding in having a case, for which there has been a verdict, returned to the court is no simple matter. Since 2006, Innocence Quebec has been part of a course at UQAM, where students work on real cases involving judicial errors, while being supervised by a lawyer.
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