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Create AccountDavid Milgaard was 16 when he was charged in 1969 in the sex slaying of a Saskatoon nurse, Gail Miller. Milgaard's prosecution became one of Canada's most notorious wrongful conviction cases.
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Donald Marshall Jr., Mi'kmaq leader, Indigenous activist, wrongly convicted of murder (born 13 September 1953 in Sydney, NS; died 6 August 2009 in Sydney, NS). Donald Marshall’s imprisonment (1971–82) became one of the most controversial cases in the history of Canada's criminal justice system. He was the first high-profile victim of a wrongful murder conviction to have it overturned, paving the way for others such as David Milgaard and Guy Paul Morin. In the 1990s, Marshall was also the central figure in a significant Supreme Court of Canada case on First Nations hunting and fishing rights.
The Guy Paul Morin case was the second major wrongful conviction case to occur in the modern era of the Canadian criminal justice system. The case was riddled with official errors — from inaccurate eyewitness testimony and police tunnel vision, to scientific bungling and the suppression of evidence. Morin had been acquitted of the murder of nine-year-old Christine Jessop in 1986, only to be found guilty at a retrial in 1992. He was cleared by DNA evidence in 1995 and received $1.25 million in compensation. In 2020, DNA evidence identified Calvin Hoover, a Jessop family friend who died in 2015, as the real killer.
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This article was originally published in Maclean’s magazine on December 6, 1999. Partner content is not updated.
He was down for the count. Rubin (Hurricane) Carter had been in prison for 13 years, serving a life sentence for a triple murder he did not commit - a brutal slaying at a bar in Paterson, N.J., in 1966.At the age of 14, Steven Truscott was wrongly convicted of killing his 12-year-old schoolmate Lynne Harper. Five decades later he was exonerated.
