On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 12:24 AM, David Mann <[email protected]> wrote:
> Now you're reminding me of last year's biggest news story about the retrial > of David Bain who was jailed in 1995 for the murder of his entire family. He > was acquitted of all charges in a retrial after serving 13 years in prison. > > The case was quite messy and the NZ public are still fiercely divided. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bain There's a Toronto-based group called the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted: http://www.aidwyc.org/ The lawyer who started it, James Lockyer is brilliant. I juniored on a trial many years ago (while he was a junior partner with a prominent Toronto criminal firm) and saw him do a cross-exam and he was amazing. I learned a lot from watching that one cross. Anyway, they've freed dozens of innocent prisoners, some of whom have spent decades in jail. As a percentage of those convicted, the wrongly convicted is very very small, but for those who've lost years of their lives, one can't imagine the torment. To my mind, one very good argument against the death penalty (some of those wrongly conviced would have been put to death were they convicted in a US death penalty state). cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
