The penalty for murder should not always be death. There have been at least, three documented cases in Canada, where the accused was found to be not guilty after spending many years in prison for crimes they did not commit. All three of these crimes were brutally committed and the victims were all young people. The public wanted justice to be served and all three of these accused were persecuted in the media when the crimes were committed. The chance for a fair trial for any of these accused was highly unlikely. If the death penalty had been invoked all three of the accused would have died for crimes they did not commit.
The first case involved wrongly, accused sixteen year old, David Milgaard. In 1970 the body of nursing aide Gail Miller was found dead in a snow bank in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The evidence pointed to David Milgaard and he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison without parole. He spent twenty-three years in prison before the Supreme Court of Canada set aside his conviction. Five years later he was cleared by DNA evidence. If capital punishment had been used in this case David Milgaard would have died for a crime he didn’t commit and Gail Miller’s murderer would never have been found.
The second case involved a fourteen-year-old, Southern Ontario boy, Steven Truscott. He was convicted in 1959, of the murder of schoolgirl, Lynne Harper, and thus became Canada’s youngest ever death-row inmate. The evidence for his conviction was based on the fact, that witnesses as young as nine years old, came forward to testify that they had seen Steven Truscott giving Lynne Harper a ride home on the handlebars of his bicycle. Two days later her body was found in a wooded grove, beaten and strangled. Truscott was the last known person to have seen her alive. Based on this evidence, he was sentenced to death by hanging, for her murder. Mr. Truscott recalls hearing a wall being built and was convinced they were building the...