MLJ Volume 36-1.pdf - Robson Hall Faculty of Law

14 MANITOBA LAW JOURNAL|VOLUME 36 ISSUE 1
demonstrated that hair microscopy evidence amounted to little more than
an educated guess.
All this was brought home to Manitoba by the case of James Driskell.
In 2002 and 2003 counsel for Driskell conducted a reinvestigation of his
case. It was accompanied by a fair bit of media coverage. As part of this,
Manitoba Justice arranged for a DNA test of the hair evidence from his
case. That test showed that hair microscopy evidence could be and had
been wrong. Something had to be done, and the Province decided to
embark upon an unprecedented experiment.
IV. THE MANITOBA FORENSIC EVIDENCE REVIEW
In April 2003, in my former life as Deputy Minister of Justice for
Manitoba, I announced the creation of the Forensic Evidence Review
Committee. Multi-disciplinary in nature, the committee was composed of
a senior crown attorney as Chair (Richard Saull, now a superior court
judge), a defence lawyer designated by the Association in Defence of the
Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC), 46 senior investigators from each of the
RCMP and the Winnipeg Police Service, a crown attorney, and a forensic
expert from the University of Manitoba with no connection to law
enforcement. The written mandate of the Committee was as follows:
The Committee shall examine all cases of culpable homicide:
prosecuted in Manitoba during the past 15 years;
in which the Crown tendered and relied upon microscopic hair comparison
evidence;
where the accused pleaded not guilty at trial, asserting factual innocence,
but was found guilty; and
appealed the conviction to the Court of Appeal, still asserting factual
innocence, and the appeal was dismissed,
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The Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted is a non-profit organization
dedicated to identifying, advocating for, and exonerating individuals convicted of a
crime that they did not commit and to preventing such injustices in the future
through education and reform. Relying primarily on the pro bono work of a few
defence counsel in Toronto following the discovery of a miscarriage of justice in the
case of Guy Paul Morin during the early 1990s, AIDWYC has since grown into a
funded, national organization with a strong track record for identifying those who
have been wrongly convicted, then advocating on their behalf: AIDWYC, online: The
Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted .