Steven Truscott and Donald Marshall Jr case

According to Skolnick 16, any miscarriage of justice impairs the reputation of the justice system and erodes the society’s confidence in the system. A wrongful conviction of a person means that the person is punished for a crime he or she did not commit while the actual perpetrator of the offense goes scot-free. Such a conviction compromises the two prongs of a criminal justice system’s legitimacy. While cases of wrongful convictions exist all over the world, the Canadian ones are a bit unique because the country has a long history of incarcerating innocent people (Champion 83). Two of the well-known individuals that were wrongfully incarcerated in the country are Steven Truscott and Donald Marshall Jr. Following the discovery of Lynne’s body, Truscott was arrested was on 12th June 1959. He was then charged with first-degree murder on 13th June 1959 under the provisions of the Juvenile Delinquents Act.

Crown Attorney then argued that the Juvenile Court did not have enough experience to handle legal issues; hence, Truscott should be tried as an adult. Despite objections from the Defense Counsel, the 14-year old was treated as an adult. The court then found Truscott guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging (Lebourdais 11). ’s incarceration became one of the most controversial cases in the criminal justice system in Canada. At only the age of 17, Marshall was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for stabbing to death Sandy Seale, his acquaintance in 1971. Sandy was also 17 years at the time of his death. The incidence that led to Sandy’s stabbing happened on 28th May 1971 when the two boys went for a walk around Wentworth Park in Sydney, Nova Scotia. While they were strolling, they met and confronted two older men, Jimmy Macneil and Roy Ebsary.

The deep-set prejudices made it difficult for the defendants to get fair trials. The cases exhibited false confessions, the prosecutors seemed to have predetermined theories, and judges showed bias in their judgments. A significant part of the evidence that the courts relied upon to acquit both Truscott and Marshall were not made available to the court at the time of their trial. For instance, according to (Roach 1465), in Truscott’s case, all the evidence availed to court against the respondent seemed circumstantial, and focused on implicating Truscott. The investigators insisted on placing Lynne’s death within a narrow time frame, which framed Truscott as the killer. Truscott and Marshall’s cases were also similar in the manner that valuable evidence emerged even after their convictions, but it was ignored and suppressed.

In Truscott’s case, compelling evidence emerged in the early 60’s linking Lynne’s murder to an enlisted man in a nearby air force base. A military investigator informed the Crown prosecutor about a more likely suspect in the town who owned a car and had suspicious behaviors. According to the military investigator, the enlisted man had earlier tried to entice a young girl into his car days before Lynne was murdered. The suspect in this new evidence even suddenly sold his car after Lynne’s murder. Consequently, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal dismissed Marshall’s appeal. Further, in 1974, the Sydney Police dismissed Ebsary’s daughter when she reported that she had seen her father wash what seemed to be blood from his knife on the night of Seale’s murder.

The Sydney Police claimed that the case was closed. Hence, the statement was not relevant. Differences in the Legal Processes and Outcomes of the Two Cases A major difference in the legal processes and outcomes of the two cases is in the different ways in which the prosecutors perceived the accused. As such, Truscott was sentenced to death before Canada’s government commuted the sentencing to life imprisonment. It was in the 1960s when the sustained debate about the death penalty began (Catherine PPT no. In the early 70s, when Marshall was convicted, a sizable number of people and organizations in the society had joined in the push to abolish the death penalty. More people opened their eyes to the brutality and cruelty that the capital punishment exhibited. This increased awareness and follow-up from the public might have prompted Marshall’s judgment to life imprisonment rather than death.

Given the exoneration, the law regards Truscott as innocent, and therefore, the society should also take him as innocent. Marshall’s exoneration in 1983 significantly raised the societal awareness on the widespread of cases of miscarriage of justice in Canada. The society came to the realization that several other people could be languishing in jail for crimes they did not commit. Following Marshall’s exoneration, 20 individuals that were convicted of murder were released on the basis of possible unfairness in their trials and serious doubts about the reliability of evidence used in their cases (Thompson 173). Works Cited Champion, C. Anatomy of a French murder case. Hawkins Press, 1997. Radelet, Michael L. Hugo Adam Bedau, and Constance E. Putnam. Quid pro books, 2011. Thompson, Andrew S. Uneasy Abolitionists: Canada, the Death Penalty, and the Importance of International Norms, 1962-2005.

Journal of Canadian Studies 42.