Digital Journal — You’ve never heard of Peter Frumusa. He resides in Fort Erie, Ontario, with a wife and a daughter and three Pomeranians. He lives quietly, the kind of person who appreciates such simple joys as staring at the moon. It’s understandable — 45-year-old Frumusa spent the early 1990s living in three different penitentiaries, convicted of the first-degree murder of a Niagara couple.
From the beginning, he claimed he never killed anyone. Police and Crown attorneys told a court that Frumusa beat the couple in their bed with a baseball bat, even though no fingerprints or bloodstains implicated him. His pleas of innocence went ignored and Frumusa lived each day behind bars as if it were his last.
“You’d never know if you’d make it to the night,” he says. “I’ve seen the most horrendous things in the world — inmates getting stabbed, raped, slashing their own throats. The pain will never go away.”
What did go away, eventually, were the damning accusations connected to Frumusa’s name. After the flimsy case against him began to unravel, Frumusa was released on bail in 1996, and in 1998 he was completely exonerated by an Ontario court. A year later, he sought $6 million in damages and settled for an undisclosed amount. Money can’t bring back eight lost years, though.
“I don’t care if I got $100 billion, no amount of money can compensate for the time I was wrongly convicted,” says Frumusa. “Maybe other actions would work as compensation, such as the government taking responsibility and putting programs in place to stop these things from happening again.”
That’s wishful thinking. Wrongful convictions will always be part of the criminal justice system as long as humans make mistakes, according to veteran lawyers working on these cases.
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James Lockyer is a founding member of the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC). — Photography by djc Features |
One such defense counsel is James Lockyer, founding member of the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC), who helped exonerate David Milgaard (23 years in prison), Guy Paul Morin (three years in prison), Frumusa and many others. Lockyer is a tireless defender of the underdog, a man who scours 10,000-page files to find the one detail that will prove his client’s innocence. He says, “Instead of fighting off arrows, I’m firing arrows.”
AIDWYC’s track record is a testament to that aggressive mindset. The Toronto-based group “has had significant success with 15 cases,” Lockyer says cautiously, since many clients are still waiting for a decision. Wrongfully convicted boxing champion Rubin “Hurricane” Carter brought celebrity power to AIDWYC when he served as executive director. And it may be a coincidence but in his native England, Lockyer attended the University of Nottingham, strangely linking him to the fabled Robin Hood. But instead of robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, Lockyer prefers to return to the poor their robbed lives.
How do these miscarriages of justice occur? You would think DNA science is advanced enough that innocent people would never have to spend a night in jail. But DNA evidence, famously used to exonerate Morin and Milgaard, is conclusive only when bodily evidence (such as semen) is detected. Defenders of the wrongly convicted point to several reasons for wrongful convictions: eyewitness identification, though unreliable, is known to sway juries; false confessions are squeezed from panic-stricken suspects; and jailhouse informants with nothing to lose become a prosecutor’s last chance and a jury’s convincing clincher.
When asked to identify the key cause behind wrongful convictions, almost everyone I interviewed replied with two words: tunnel vision. “No one likes to believe they’re wrong,” says Louis Sokolov, a lawyer who worked on 11 wrongful-conviction cases. “Cops and prosecutors often ignore or discount evidence inconsistent with the theory of guilt.” After a gruesome crime like a double murder, the public is hungry for revenge, Sokolov says, and they want someone behind bars. But to send a man to jail for a crime he didn’t commit is a horrible act to which no one would want to admit responsibility.
“We work on a presumption of guilt in this world,” charges Alan Young, a Toronto law professor who helped found The Innocence Project, an organization similar to AIDWYC and modelled after the U.S. group of the same name. “Look at the O.J. case, where police target an individual and stop investigating other avenues. O.J. was acquitted and guess what, there was no investigation into finding another murderer.” Even if the evidence had pointed to O.J.’s guilt, that didn’t mean police had to close the case so hastily — condemning someone before a conviction is made allows a possible killer to roam free.
Joyce Milgaard’s son spent 23 years — almost half his life — in prison before being cleared by DNA evidence. Working as AIDWYC’s regional representative in Winnipeg, she is preparing for David’s long-awaited inquiry in early 2005. “Those held accountable are not going to be able to cover up anymore,” she says.
Milgaard joins a chorus of legal professionals who want an independent board established to review post-conviction criminal cases, similar to the U.K. model. Only through an autonomous commissioner and staff will the review process be more balanced and less tedious, they say.
“An independent board is feasible and if Justice Minister Irwin Cotler is reappointed, he’s more likely than any justice minister to accept that idea,” says Lockyer.
According to the government’s defenders, however, the current process is fine the way it is. Kerry Scullion is acting senior counsel for the Criminal Conviction Review Group, created by the Department of Justice to review and investigate wrongful-conviction applications. “This constant rhetoric about independence is hogwash,” says Scullion. “We’re removed from the Department of Justice because we have an independent advisor and our staff is a mixed bag of both prosecutors and defense counsel.” He adds that even his office is several blocks away from government headquarters.
The group receives around 30 applications a year from prisoners claiming their innocence and Scullion admits the power of priority comes into play. If the applicant is in custody, no matter the crime, his file is moved to the top of the heap. New evidence needs to “jump out at you,” says Scullion.
According to Patrick Charette at the Department of Justice, 58 wrongful-conviction decisions were rendered between 1995 and 2003. Twelve cases were granted new trials or moved to Court of Appeal and 46 cases were denied release.
Thomas Sophonow is one of those 12 angry men who fought to prove his innocence. He was granted release after spending four years in prison for allegedly killing a 16-year-old girl in Winnipeg. He doesn’t like to talk about those prison days, the specific incidents, and I don’t probe. He does remember feeling confused, lying awake in his cell and asking himself why this or that witness lied. It was only after his exoneration and a lengthy litigation process that awarded him $2.6 million from all three levels of government that Sophonow finally felt some closure, as much as that was possible. Now living in New Westminster, B.C., Sophonow hopes his story will be more than just a juicy headline.
“With every wrongful conviction and inquiry, that’s one more brick in the wall,” he says. “That wall will hopefully show people that the justice system should be changed. Now.”
THE UNITED MISTAKES OF AMERICA: A REPORT ON THE WRONGFULLY CONVICTED IN THE U.S.
- From 1989 to 2003, there were 328 successful exonerations. Of those, 44 per cent were cleared by DNA evidence
- The rate of exonerations increased from 12 a year in the early 1990s to 40 a year after 2000
- 97 per cent of exonerations were for either murder or rape cases
- 22 per cent of the exonerated were death row inmates, despite being just 0.25 per cent of the prison population
- 90 per cent of exonerated juveniles were African-American or Hispanic
- The four leading states for exonerations are Illinois (54), New York (35), Texas (28) and California (22)
Source: “Exonerations in the United States, 1989 to 2003,” Samuel Gross, University of Michigan
