FYI: First Column: Why I care about Ostrowski

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/11/2009 (5410 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WHY should any­one care about Frank Ostrowski? Yes, the one-time hair­stylist made a small fortune selling cocaine in Winnipeg in the mid-1980s.

Yes, the one-time hair-stylist made a small fortune selling cocaine in Winnipeg in the mid-1980s.

Yes, he associated with some bad people.

Yes, he had a really big mouth that landed him in a lot of trouble.

I’ve heard a lot of bad stuff about Ostrowski over the years since he was convicted in 1987 of orchestrating the execution of small-time drug dealer Robert Nieman in September 1986 because Nieman gave him up to police.

Some of the stuff I heard came from people who hung with him back in the day. Some from old cops. Some from guys Ostrowski has done time with. But most of the bad stuff I’ve heard about Ostrowski has come from Ostrowski himself.

Ostrowski, 60, appeared in court this week asking to be released on bail pending a decision by Ottawa on his claim he was wrongfully convicted. He wants a new trial to prove his innocence.

Ostrowski, now 23 years behind bars, has said since Day 1 he had nothing to do with Nieman’s killing since he had no reason to see Nieman dead. Nieman knew nothing about his cocaine business. Period.

Ostrowski and I have talked a lot over the past six years, me going out to Rockwood Institution to visit him and talking to him on the phone.

Ostrowski has told me his life story many times. He likes to talk.

I’ve followed his case almost from the beginning. I was just starting to cover the courts when he was on trial, along with three other guys. One walked, Ostrowski and the two other guys were convicted. The two pulled the trigger; the jury found Ostrowski ordered it.

I remember popping into the courtroom at the time and seeing them all in the prisoners’ box — at that time for me anyone who sat in the box was guilty. Heck, if their name was on the docket they were guilty.

Why I paid as much attention to the trial, besides the fact it made headlines almost every day, is that a long time ago I went to elementary school with Nieman.

He was a few grades behind me, but every kid in Brock Corydon School knew who he was. Nieman had been adopted by a well-known family in our neighbourhood, and although they gave him all the love in the world, young Robbie couldn’t keep out of trouble.

When I started looking into Ostrowski’s case, and his claim he was wrongfully convicted, I took it with a grain of salt.

What guy in prison hasn’t been railroaded, right?

It took Ostrowski a long time to convince me that there was something to his case.

By then I’d already covered Thomas Sophonow’s exoneration by former Winnipeg police chief Jack Ewatski, and followed it up with reporting on the new suspect in Barbara Stoppel’s 1981 murder, Terry Arnold.

So by then I’d learned our justice system is far from perfect, and that sometimes the wrong guy goes to jail.

So my dealings with Ostrowski continued.

Then came James Driskell and Kyle Unger, who had also been convicted of murder, but made successful claims they, too, had been wrongly convicted.

With the Sophonow, Driskell and Unger cases, I also learned bad science and bad witnesses combined to make bad prosecutions. So did bad disclosure of police evidence to defence lawyers.

I started taking some of Ostrowski’s claims more seriously. I’ve now written almost 20 stories on his case. I plan to write a lot more.

In my humble opinion, the most egregious aspect of Ostrowski’s case is the apparent failure of police and the Crown to disclose vital evidence at his 1987 trial.

His lawyer then, Greg Brodsky, had to defend Ostrowski without the evidence that a key witness had negotiated a secret deal in exchange for his testimony to get a drug-trafficking charge against him dropped.

Police and/or the Crown also failed to disclose an internal police report about the same witness, who called police the day before Nieman was shot and identified another man as the target.

The failure to disclose this material means this witness could have lied under oath and Brodsky was powerless to catch him at it. It also means that if he did lie, those in the courtroom who knew about the deal and the phone call allowed him to get away with it. And the jury was none the wiser.

More important, what was allowed to happen got Ostrowski convicted based on what this one witness said. There was no other direct evidence.

To say the standards of evidence and disclosure were different back then is meaningless. An accused has always been afforded the right to a fair trial in this country.

That’s why I care about Frank Ostrowski.

bruce.owen@freepress.mb.ca