Wrongful Convictions and Ontario's Innocence Movement

Two of Canada's most consequential wrongful conviction cases both ran through Ontario's courts — and directly produced the country's leading organization dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions.

Guy Paul Morin

In October 1984, nine-year-old Christine Jessop was murdered in Queensville, Ontario. Police focused on her neighbour, Guy Paul Morin, who was acquitted at his first trial in 1986 but convicted at a Crown-initiated retrial in 1992. DNA testing unavailable at the time of the original investigation cleared Morin in January 1995; he received $1.25 million in compensation. In 2020, DNA evidence identified a Jessop family friend, who had since died, as the actual killer. A subsequent public inquiry documented systemic failures: eyewitness "tunnel vision" by investigators, flawed forensic work, and non-disclosure of evidence favourable to the defence.

Steven Truscott

In 1959, 14-year-old Steven Truscott was convicted of murdering a classmate near Clinton, Ontario, and sentenced to death — the youngest person ever sentenced to hang in Canada; his sentence was commuted before his 1969 parole. In 2004 the federal government referred the case back to the courts, and on August 28, 2007, the Court of Appeal for Ontario — sitting, like Bedford v. Canada, at Osgoode Hall — quashed the conviction and entered an acquittal, calling it a miscarriage of justice.

An organization born from Morin's case

A volunteer committee formed in 1992 during Morin's fight for exoneration became the founding basis for the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, established in Toronto in February 1993 by criminal lawyers including James Lockyer. Renamed Innocence Canada, the organization has since helped exonerate dozens of wrongly convicted Canadians nationwide, with Toronto and Ontario cases sitting at the historical core of its origin story.

Sources

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Guy Paul Morin Case
• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Steven Truscott Case
• Innocence Canada — Official Site