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