It seems that all my life I was aware of Steven Truscott. He was 14 when convicted in 1959 of the rape and murder of 12 year old Lynne Harper, and I was 13 at that time.

It was a case that would never die for the Canadian public. Initially, spurred on by the headlines of the time that Truscott was the perpetrator, I think like many others, far away from the Clinton Ontario area where the crime took place, I thought him guilty and really didn’t pay him much attention following the conviction. But the case kept rearing its head over the years. I can recall numerous television programs taking yet another look at the case, and stirring the pot over and over again. Truscott kept stating his innocence, though it seemed that few seriously listened. This Hour Has Seven Days played an interview with Steven’s mother in 1966 that apparently led to the firing of host Laurier LaPierre and later the cancellation of the show. Moved by the anguish of the mother, LaPierre wiped a tear from his eye and showed emotion in his voice, enough reaction for CBC brass (that never like the controversial show) to label LaPierre “unprofessional”, cancel his contract, and later can the show.

He spent some four months on death row, his original sentence being to hang for the crime, certainly a terrifying situation for a boy in his mid teens tried as an adult. Thankfully (particularly in light of recent events) this was commuted, and amazingly he was paroled after only ten years of imprisonment. He somewhat disappeared at that time, since the call to get his case re-examined was not as strident now that he was out of prison, and got himself in occasional trouble with the law. Not an unlikely situation for someone coming from ten years of training in one of the nation’s prisons. He married and had three children as his life progressed.

As he grew older, he started making efforts for people to look at his case again, and this finally received a push from a CBC Fifth Estate show on him in 2000 and the accumulation over the years of several books on his story, cumulating with Julian Sher’s Until You are Dead: Steven Truscott’s Long Ride into History in 2001. Finally, the Ontario Court of Appeal started a fresh look at the case in 2006, and just two weeks ago its decision was the acquittal of Steven Truscott for the rape and murder of young Lynne Harper, 48 years after his initial conviction.

A major factor in the exoneration was the vastly improved scientific methods that can be applied to a case today, and even, as with the Truscott case, applied to cases years old. A major factor in the original conviction, however, seemed to be a strong desire by the law enforcement community of his area to get someone charged with the crime, try him with the intent of a quick conviction, and get the matter closed.

We’ve heard of a number of these cases over the past years. The Donald Marshall case is well known. Just up the road from me lives former Lockeport school teacher Clayton Johnson, convicted in 1993 of the murder of his wife Janice, and freed from a 25 years without parole sentence in 1998 as the Nova Scotia Court of Appeals looked into his case, leading to a decision in 2002 that he had not been convicted beyond a reasonable doubt.

I’ve been a bit of a hawk on the matter of capital punishment in the past, but it’s hard to maintain that stance in the light of the people the court has put away unjustly over the years. John Grisham’s latest book, The Innocent Man, details a case of similar miscarriage in the US, and mentions numerous others. Certainly it’s a tragedy of tremendous proportion that Steven Truscott lost ten years of his adolescence in prison, experienced the terror and hopelessness of four months staring at a noose on death row, and lived many, many more years under the pall of being a convicted rapist and murderer of a 12 year old girl. In the face of it, however, it would have been even more of a tragedy if we were now looking at a decision that the 1959 15-day trial was flawed and that a fourteen year old boy was “hanged by the neck until dead” for a crime that he never committed.

With DNA evidence, and CSI-like techno sleuthing, we appear to have moved into a time when the Steven Truscott travesty would be unlikely to happen. People certainly make that claim. I certainly hope so, but I’m leaving the door open just a bit.