The June Callwood Lecture couldn’t have planned better timing this year. When the committee picked James Lockyer, the co-founding director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongfully Convicted, they couldn’t have known that their speaker would win a shocking victory over the Crown roughly 48 hours before he took the podium to deliver his speech, “Justice Denied: The Wrongfully Convicted in Canada.” But he did, and so the Metro Toronto Reference Library was beyond capacity when he took the stage last Friday night. The organizers were still dragging chairs downstairs as the introductions started.
Lockyer didn’t say much that was new: his speech once again ran down the list of wrongful convictions that have made headlines and been overturned in the past year, all of which Lockyer himself has had a role in.
In the last 12 months, Stephen Truscott, Erin Walsh, William Mullins-Johnson, and Robert Baltovich have all had their convictions drop-kicked by the courts, based on flimsy evidence, shoddy police work, dodgy prison testimony, and in Mullins-Johnson’s case, the total lack of any crime at all. (It turns out Mullins-Johnson’s four-year-old niece died of natural causes, but Dr. Charles Smith, the crashingly incompetent forensic examiner who is currently the subject of a massive provincial inquiry, erroneously believed it was murder. Um, oops.) On the heels of these four spectacular judicial U-turns, Lockyer ominously said there are “more in the wings.”
There were two points Lockyer made during his speech which bear repeating: First, in the Robert Baltovich case, he called out the newspaper columnists — he didn’t name names, although from the article he quoted it’s clear he was talking about the Globe and Mail‘s Christie Blatchford — who still strongly imply that Baltovich is guilty of murder, or at the very least, that he’s a weird, squirrelly creep.
“In the last few days we seem to have got a new sort of justice in Canada,” he said, clutching a fistful of newspaper clippings at the podium. We now have something he called “trial by columnist,” in which journalists pontificate in print about who is and is not a murderer, regardless of the conclusions of the law of the land. “You have to wonder who these people think they are,” Lockyer said, with the arrogance of someone who has been on the winning side of four quashed wrongful convictions in under a year.
Second, Lockyer called for a post-conviction tribunal which would examine and double-check the work of courts in important cases, and send the most contentious to appeal. He rattled off some shocking statistics from Britain, where the Criminal Cases Review Commission has referred 384 cases to the court of appeal, and 248 have been overturned. Lockyer is agitating to have a similar review body set up in Canada to hear cases like Robert Baltovich’s, where the conviction turned on a knife edge, nudged over to guilty by, say, a barely credible witness or shoddy instructions from a trial judge. Who knows what his chances are, but judging from a moment early in the evening, the public — or, at least, the lecture-going public — is on board. Before he launched into the text of his speech, Lockyer introduced his latest star ex-convict, Robert Baltovich, who was sitting a few rows from the front and rather reluctantly rose to wave to the applauding crowd.
The night ended mercifully without the question-and-answer period that so often ruin a perfectly good lecture. Instead, to close out the night, folky singer Jon Brooks sang a painfully earnest song — complete with a mortifying sing-along chorus that he attempted to coax out of the audience — called “May We Believe,” about, well, justice or something. It was an icing layer of self-righteous cheese that the evening really didn’t need, but the song did feature a repeated line that perfectly fit Lockyer’s message: “What a lot a little more justice could do.”