GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT
David Milgaard speaks of the fight for justice at second annual Wrongful Conviction Day
David Milgaard doesn’t like to stand at a podium.
“I hope you won’t mind if I don’t use the microphone,” he tells a small crowd gathered Friday morning in a Mount Royal University theatre. “I like to walk as I talk to you — and move around the room.”
One can hardly blame the youthful 63-year-old for chafing at the usual conventions of public speaking. This is, after all, a man who spent 23 years of his life in prison. Not only that, Milgaard’s long prison stint was for a crime he didn’t commit.
After a review of his case by the Supreme Court of Canada, his conviction for the murder of Gail Miller was set aside in 1992. Since then, Milgaard has been building a life for himself, the past seven years living in the Calgary area. A major part of his healing, he readily admits, involves advocating for others facing such an unimaginable situation.
“I’m tired and a little bit angry,” he says just before the start of a panel discussion on the second annual Wrongful Conviction Day (wrongfulconvictionday.com). The day is the creation of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, a national non-profit organization.
“In our Canadian prisons right now, we have wrongly convicted men, we have wrongly convicted women and, in some cases, children, sitting in cages,” says Milgaard. “I have to speak for them.”
On this day, three experts on the issue of the wrongfully convicted speak ahead of Canada’s most well known innocent former prisoner. The first, veteran Calgary criminal defence lawyer Hersh Wolch, is no stranger to Milgaard’s plight — he helped to get him free, along with such other famed wrongfully convicted as Steven Truscott and Kyle Unger.
Wolch begins his talk by asking the room if they have heard about the recent murders in Blairmore of a young man and his two-yearold daughter. “How many of you have a presumption of innocence?” he asks of the accused, Derek Saretzky. “I bet everyone here thinks he’s guilty.”
He then launches into an indictment of the media and the police — police feed the media their info and the media can’t afford to “tick” them off — in the watering down of the time honoured principle of presumption of innocence. Wolch also speaks about the role of eyewitness unreliability, what he calls “junk science” — he cites one expert on footwear who made the cover of Time magazine, only to be debunked soon after — and the prevalence of false confessions.
Add to that dishonest jailhouse “snitches” and under-funded and overworked defence lawyers, he says, and you have a recipe for the kinds of mistakes that put innocent people behind bars.
“In all honesty, when the cases are over, they are so obviously innocent,” he says of many of the cases, referring directly to Milgaard’s: “DNA didn’t make David innocent, he was innocent.”
Janne Holmgren, a DNA expert with Mount Royal University’s justice studies department, continues Wolch’s criticisms of police work, specifically interrogation techniques. The general public, she says, puts a lot of “pressure on police to solve crimes,” which can often lead to ignoring other evidence that doesn’t correspond with their assumption of who committed the crime; she also cites defence lawyers’ lack of understanding of DNA technology as another thing working against the proper carriage of justice.
After Calgary lawyer Michelle Christopher offers her criticisms of Canada’s current review policies on the wrongfully convicted, it is Milgaard’s turn to speak.
He first reads out an emotional excerpt of his sister Susan’s writings, about the guilt loved ones feel for being on the outside when they know their family member is innocent.
“We’re OK as a family, things are all right,” says Milgaard, a father of two who recently moved his family to Cochrane. “I usually talk to my mother once, twice a week, she’s doing OK.”
It’s for those who have yet to get their freedom that he continues to speak out. “We must put it in the hands of people like you and me,” he says of his call for an independent review committee for those claiming to be wrongfully convicted. “The present process isn’t working to solve the problem.”
To drive home his point, Milgaard asks his audience to try to imagine being a teenager like he once was, facing a life sentence for a crime they didn’t commit. “It is time for me to wake you all up. This can really happen to you and maybe your children,” he says. “I spent most of my life living this horrible nightmare. And I want to stress, it is time to say enough,” says the man who will no longer be hemmed in by anything, even if it’s a simple speaker’s podium. “We must never, never give up.”