A rchive Date
[ 11-06-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[Not guilty - not now, not ever
By LINDA WILLIAMSON
Toronto Sun
June 11, 2000
If federal Justice Minister Anne McLellan thought Thomas Sophonow would appreciate her announcing a new system to help the wrongly convicted on the same day he officially joined their ranks, she should think again.
"That really pissed me off," the normally extra-polite Sophonow told me Thursday, hours after his exoneration for the Dec. 23, 1981 Winnipeg murder of 16-year-old waitress Barbara Stoppel was made offical.
Sophonow's ordeal, mostly unknown outside of Winnipeg until this week, exploded into national prominence when the city's police chief, Jack Ewatski, made an extraordinary apology to Sophonow, who was thrice tried and twice convicted of second-degree murder before the Manitoba Court of Appeal set him free after 45 months in prison.
A full inquiry is set to review how the system failed him; meanwhile, Winnipeg police have a new suspect in the case.
It was stunning news. As a Winnipeg Sun reporter in the early '80s, I covered Sophonow's final trial, appeal and release and have been unable to get the case out of my head since. We have remained in touch over the years, and Sophonow, a quiet, private, religious family man, has shown remarkable persistence in clearing his name.
Listening to the national media's brief descriptions of the case in recent days - "there was no physical evidence to link him to the crime and he had an alibi, backed up by witnesses," went one report - I had to shake my head. Exactly. It seems so obvious now. Yet two judges, two juries and heaven knows how many police and ordinary Winnipeggers were willing to believe the case was closed, that justice had been done.
Sophonow maintained his innocence throughout his trials, which had all the earmarks of a prosecution run amok - jailhouse informants who claimed, in exchange for deals with the Crown, to have heard him confess mistaken identification; even a juror who was removed during deliberations for claiming to be "psychic" (she thought him not guilty).
Witnesses who said Sophonow matched the description of the lanky "cowboy" seen at the murder scene were allowed to say their memories of him had gotten better and better over the years; witnesses who said a man matching his description was delivering Christmas stockings for children in hospital at the time of the murder - Sophonow's remarkable alibi - were dismissed as irrelevant. It was quite a circus.
Convictions overturned
The first trial ended in a hung jury, the second two resulted in convictions that were overturned and, ultimately, in 1985, the Manitoba Court of Appeal (upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada) said enough was enough - and released him.
What they didn't do was declare him innocent. So Sophonow kept fighting, sending letters to anyone who might be able to help, including one Anne McLellan.
"She told me there was nothing she could do," Sophonow told me, a rare note of bitterness in his voice. It's clear he thinks her announcement on his big day was no coincidence. And that he takes a dim view of McLellan's proposal to have a special team of investigators review wrongful convictions, reporting back to her and her department.
As the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC), which provided Sophonow's latest legal team, notes, any review of wrongful convictions must be conducted by a body independent of the government and the justice system - otherwise, what good is it?
"We all know where that's headed, don't we?" mused Sophonow. "Right into the dumper."
And if McLellan's not going to listen to a victim of the system like Sophonow, perhaps she might want to heed an august authority like Gregory Evans, former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ontario and a member of the Donald Marshall inquiry - the one that opened Canadians' eyes to the fact that, yes, police and prosecutors sometimes do make terrible mistakes, like relying on jailhouse informants and faulty eyewitness testimony.
Both Evans and Justice Fred Kaufman, the Guy Paul Morin inquiry judge, insisted in their reports that the body reviewing wrongful convictions must be independent. As Evans put it to me Thursday, how can it be independent if it's run by a "civil servant"?
How could McLellan ignore these men's advice? The same way she ignores public outcry over the Young Offenders Act?
That just won't do. As Paul Bennett, Sophonow's lawyer and a Toronto director of AIDWYC, said Friday, the association is currently working on 21 other active files - "21 more Tom Sophonows" - all apparently wrongful murder convictions.
Twenty-one more reasons for McLellan to rethink her policy.
Linda Williamson is the Toronto Sun senior associate editor. She can be reached by e-mail at lwilliam@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]]
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