Manitoba Justice clings to wrongful convictions

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/12/2018 (2118 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Once again, Manitoba Justice has demonstrated the lengths to which it will go to fight the bad fight.

Last week, the Manitoba Court of Appeal quashed the 1987 first-degree murder conviction of drug dealer Frank Ostrowski after determining that his original trial represented a miscarriage of justice.

The Crown withheld the details of a secret deal with a star witness used to convict Ostrowski, along with notes from a police officer who spoke with that witness before the slaying, a conversation that cast further doubt on who was responsible for the execution-style killing of Robert Nieman.

The court did not acquit Ostrowski, 69, arguing there was other evidence that might lead a jury to find him guilty. However, given that more than 30 years have passed, the court believed a new trial was impractical.

It deserves to be noted that this decision does not change the fact that Ostrowski is an unsavoury character. Still, police and prosecutors stacked the deck against him. We know this because this is not the first time Manitoba Justice has been caught cheating the system.

For those of you keeping score, this is the fourth case managed by former prosecutor George Dangerfield that was later determined to be a miscarriage of justice. Preceding Ostrowski were Thomas Sophonow, James Driskell and Kyle Unger.

A fifth Dangerfield case, Robert Sanderson, is on the verge of implosion. The federal Justice Department has concluded that a miscarriage of justice likely occurred in Sanderson’s 1996 triple-homicide conviction. He remains in a B.C. prison awaiting a decision by Federal Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould about how to proceed.

And a sixth Dangerfield case involving Mohamed Khan, convicted in 1994 of murdering his wife, is making its way through the federal convictions review group with the help of the Innocence Project.

Dangerfield’s cases are pockmarked with failures to disclose crucial information, deliberate misrepresentation of forensic or scientific evidence, and secret compensation deals to secure testimony from criminals.

Dangerfield’s cases have cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in compensating the victims of his wrongful convictions, and two judicial inquiries (Sophonow and Driskell) that laid bare what was a compromised and corrupt culture at Manitoba Justice.

With a record like that, why would Manitoba Justice continue to fight every one of Dangerfield’s questionable convictions so strenuously? It has taken decades in some cases to get Dangerfield’s convictions quashed despite the presence of overwhelming evidence of prosecutorial wrongdoing.

The cases are complex, but the common thread in just about every one is a systemic refusal by Manitoba Justice to do the right thing, even when presented with evidence of a miscarriage of justice. The department’s questionable actions have taken place during NDP and Conservative governments.

In all of these cases, Manitoba Justice fought long and hard to preserve convictions that were essentially corrupt. Even after being shown evidence of that corruption, the department has spent millions to delay and frustrate the efforts of those trying to overturn the convictions.

Even today, you will find people in Manitoba Justice who will argue that Sophonow, Driskell, Unger and now Ostrowski are guilty. But consider this: Manitoba Justice is 0 and 4 in its efforts to preserve the original verdict in Dangerfield’s cases. And very soon, the department will likely be 0 and 6.

With a record like that, you would think Manitoba Justice might consider a different approach, one that allows it to look objectively at evidence of a miscarriage of justice and take appropriate steps to deliver a remedy that doesn’t require the victims to spend decades fighting for their innocence.

Instead, Manitoba Justice has become even less willing to co-operate with those claiming they are innocent.

It took Ostrowski 17 years to establish that he was a victim of a miscarriage of justice. Much of that delay was due to the deliberate stonewalling by Manitoba Justice, which dragged its collective feet with the petulant conviction of a toddler refusing to respect bedtime.

This systemic obstinance is not confined to Dangerfield cases. Consider the case of Deveryn Ross, a political staffer for Premier Brian Pallister. As was the situation in the Dangerfield cases, the federal Justice Department reviewed Ross’s claims and concluded that a miscarriage of justice likely occurred in his 1995 fraud trial, a finding based on the discovery of thousands of pages of previously undisclosed evidence.

In 2014, after 11 years of fencing with Manitoba Justice to obtain the undisclosed evidence, Ottawa asked the Manitoba Court of Appeal to pass judgment on the original conviction.

However, rather than settling this case, Manitoba Justice hired a private lawyer who has engaged in the same delay tactics that were honed in the Dangerfield cases. That lawyer was ultimately successful in convincing the appellate court to exclude a huge tract of the new evidence.

The perversity of the strategy being employed by Manitoba Justice, and the appellate court’s decision to endorse that strategy, cannot be overstated.

Ottawa referred the case to the Manitoba Court of Appeal based on the magnitude and importance of the undisclosed evidence. How can the appellate court do its job without looking at all that evidence? It’s pure madness.

But it has also proved to be successful. Manitoba Justice hasn’t succeeded in derailing any of the wrongful convictions that have arisen under its watch. But it has made the path to exoneration longer, more difficult and more expensive for those claiming innocence.

And that might be the real goal for anyone committed to fighting the bad fight.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca