Dr. Joyce Milgaard!

Last week, Joyce Milgaard received an honorary doctor of Law degree at the University of Manitoba. She spoke at the Duckworth Center to an audience of 2500 people, encouraging them to support an independent panel that would review claims of wrongful conviction. England, Australia and New Zealand already have such boards but the United States and Canada are far behindin that respect. This is something that AIDWYC (The Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted) has advocated for years.

It's about time that Joyce received some accolades for her years of labor after the way that she has been attacked in the Inquiry for forcing the police and justice system to do its job.

Sigridmac

Way behind

I'm *way* behind in my posts because frankly, I had hoped that the inquiry would end months ago. I'm going to take a break from posting and recommend that all of you catch up on the news by visiting CBC, Injustice Busters and AIDWYC. All of these web sites are in my link section to the right.

Thanks for understanding. I will probably return in a month or two to wrap things up.

Sigrid

Was the Department Of Justice Slow to Move in Milgaard's Appeal?

That's what David Asper believes. He told the inquiry today that Eugene Williams, former investigator for the federal Justice Department, created delays in responding to various portions of the Milgaard appeal.

Milgaard first wrote to the federal Justice Department in January of 1986, asking for his case to be reopened. Asper did not file the documents until December of 1988, according to Betty Ann Adam of the Saskatoon Star Phoenix.

Approximately two years later, Kim Campbell, Justice Minister at the time, turned down Milgaard's request, forcing him and his lawyers to file a second application in August of 1991. Milgaard's case went before the Supreme Court of Canada, at Campbell's referral, in November of 1991. The rest is history.

Sigrid Mac

Back in the Saddle

The Milgaard Inquiry will return to the job at hand on Monday, in the hopes ofgathering the remainder of the necessary information from witnesses by the end of September.

Former Milgaard defense lawyer, David Asper, will testify again this week, after a summer break.

Sigrid Mac

A Break at Long Last

The Milgaard inquiry will be taking a break for the summer -- thank God! I have been having great difficulty keeping up with it since it has gone on so much longer than anyone had ever anticipated.

Tim Cook from the Canadian Press states that throughout "the 170 hearing days since the inquiry began in January of 2005, Justice Edward MacCallum has listened to 107 witnesses, and the previous testimony of 18 more has been read into the record. The transcript is now more than 35,000 pages long.

"The budget has ballooned from $2 million initially to about $10 million as it sits now - $7.5 million of which has already been spent. " Whew.

One issue that the inquiry has had to struggle with, according to Cook, is the misperception that this case has been analyzed left, right, and upside down over the years when David had two trials, appeared before the Supreme Court, had a TV movie made about him, and was the subject of at least two different books.

However, according to Doug Hodson, lawyer for the official commission, this material needs to be assembled and viewed within a proper context. Many accusations have been made over the decades, including the idea that police, prosecutors or government officials knew that Larry Fisher may have been the real murderer. This notion has not been supported by evidence presented at the hearing thus far.

The inquiry will reconvene at the end of August, ostensibly for another five weeks.

Sigrid Mac

Milgaards Still under Fire

Catherine Knox, representing former Crown prosecutor Bobs Caldwell at the inquiry, suggested that Joyce Milgaard and her defense team made several remarks and accusations against certain people, including Caldwell, that were false.

Many times over the years, Joyce referred to a knife that was found near Gail Miller's body, which she believed that Caldwell had ignored. It has now been firmly established that the knife was unrelated to the murder. Milgaard conceded this fact but said that she still could not "wash him clean" and the inquiry had to remember that during this period of time, she was unable to trust the police, the prosecutors, her own original defense lawyer and the criminal justice system in general.

Joyce was also accused by Knox of saying that Calvin Tallis, David Milgaard's own lawyer, had withheld important information at his trial and that in the 1980s, the Saskatoon police told witnesses not to talk to her. Joyce acknowledges now that the police only told witnesses that they didn't have to speak with her, but she refuses to apologize for any of the above statements that she made that may have been incorrect. She wants people to realize that she was understandably distrustful of the entire system because her innocent son spent 23 years behind bars for a crime that he did not commit.

Sigrid Mac

Williams Continues

Eugene Williams has been testifying at the inquiry this week. He was a former lawyer for the federal Justice Department who reported to the Justice Minister.

Williams explained that it was not his role to make any decisions about the cases that he reviewed. His task was to screen out the applications and pass on his thoughts and observations to the Minister. Thus, he could advise but ultimately he didn't have the final decision-making power.

Williams stated that Milgaard's first application under Section 690 of the Criminal Code was rejected because the Milgaard camp had questioned the conclusions of the forensic evidence; semen that had been found in the snow next to Gail Miller's body had been reanalyzed and Deb Hall, a girl who was at a party with Dave when he had supposedly confessed to killing Miller, had come forth saying that David was simply being silly and sarcastic that night and that no one had believed that he was involved. These two items were presented in the application as new evidence, which was needed in order to file the 690.

However, Williams was not satisfied with the conclusions of the forensic lab and intimated that the Milgaards had not prepared their original application as well as they could have. He also made it clear that he felt that the responsibility to prove that a potential miscarriage of justice had occurred was on Milgaard and his lawyers, not on the Justice Department.

Furthermore, Eugene Williams stated that the more pressure that the Milgaards put on the media, the more it slowed him and the Justice Department down. He complained that he had to spend additional time preparing responses for the Minister to deliver to the press and said: "The public's view is being shaped by a series of articles that didn't fully reflect the facts as I knew them and I was unable to correct that perception without violating the law as I understood it."

Sigrid Mac

Source material : Julie Saccone, Saskatchewan News Network
CVC.ca Saskatchewan