High price to pay for justice
Monday, November 06
- Organization: Toronto Star
His biggest loss was time with his kids
Ron Dalton was a bank manager, but he was naive. He innocently believed that since he didn't kill his wife, he couldn't possibly be found guilty of murder.
But Dalton was convicted — a mistake that stole 12 years from his life and led to two trials, an appeal, a lawsuit and a recent public inquiry into his case, as well as into two other wrongful convictions in Newfoundland.
"It's been a $20 million make-work project for lawyers," he said in an interview over the weekend in Toronto, where he spoke to members of the Criminal Lawyers' Association at their annual conference.
That high cost of injustice was largely due to the prosecution's refusal to admit to a possible weakness in its case, he said.
A Crown culture that insists on winning at all costs and stubbornly refuses to concede error was one of the biggest barriers to overturning his conviction, said Dalton, who was 32 when his wife died. Another was finding lawyers who were prepared to dedicate time to helping him, especially when he ran out of money.
Since he was charged, one organization in particular, the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, has gone to bat for victims of miscarriages of justice. The Innocence Project at York University has also entered the field.
But Canada should not be depending on volunteer groups to investigate and expose miscarriages of justice, Dalton said. It needs a publicly funded review body operating at arm's-length from government, similar to one in place in Britain, he said.
Defence lawyers at the conference had a rare opportunity to hear Dalton's story in chilling detail, a story not well-known outside Newfoundland.
It began on Aug. 15, 1988, the longest day of his life. Dalton, a bank manger in Gander, had stopped at the RCMP detachment to pick up tickets for the policemen's ball and made restaurant reservations to celebrate his upcoming 11th wedding anniversary.
When he arrived home, his three children were asleep upstairs. He joined his wife Brenda, who was on a loveseat watching the news and eating a bowl of cereal.
She began to choke. Dalton patted her on the back, but it didn't help. Her face turned "beet red." He went to the kitchen to get a glass of water, returning to find her unconscious.
"I ran my finger through her mouth and the top of her throat to see if anything was there," he said. "I blew a few breaths into her and her chest would rise."
Dalton called an ambulance and Brenda was rushed to hospital. An inexperienced resident was in charge of the emergency room and botched the resuscitation by sliding a breathing tube into her stomach instead of her lungs. The inside of her throat was inevitably scratched. She did not survive.
Dalton stayed up all night with the neighbours, "wondering how I was going to explain to a 6-year-old and a 9-year-old that their mother is dead." His youngest was 18 months old.
"I waited until the sun broke to do that. I went into my oldest son's bedroom, sat down on the edge of his bed and tearfully told him." The two of them later knelt by his daughter's bed and told her.
By nightfall, Dalton was charged with second-degree murder, based on the findings of a local pathologist who performed an autopsy. He was not allowed to attend his wife's funeral.
In those days, the Crown was not legally required to disclose all relevant evidence to the defence. Close to his trial, Dalton learned that the pathologist, who had no formal training in forensic pathology, concluded Brenda Dalton had died from manual strangulation.
He even went so far as to say her killer had used his right hand. For evidence, he pointed to the internal scratches on her throat.
"He thought he was Quincy, basically," Dalton said. However, there were no other signs of injury consistent with strangulation, such as external neck bruising, fractured cartilage or hemorrhaging in the eyes.
The Crown wouldn't spend the money to get a second expert opinion, Dalton said.
At his trial, the jury preferred the testimony of their local doctor over the defence expert, a forensic pathologist from Philadelphia who had performed thousands of autopsies, including hundreds involving death by strangulation.
Dalton spent two years languishing in a 5-by-7 ft. cell in Renous penitentiary in New Brunswick, waiting for a trial transcript to be typed so he could proceed with his appeal. His trial lawyer strung him along for another two years after that. Four years into his sentence, Dalton learned he hadn't done any work on the case.
Dalton found another lawyer, but the Newfoundland legal aid system took a year before deciding to fund the case. For the next two years, Dalton waited. His lawyer sent him letters regularly, updating him on the "progress" of the case.
"I was sitting in a little steel cage up in northern New Brunswick, maximum security, trying to hang onto this little box of correspondence, hoping the next tear gassing or flood doesn't take that down."
But once again, Dalton had been fed a story. Seven years into his sentence, he filed his own handwritten legal brief with the Newfoundland Court of Appeal.
"The catalyst for actually getting it to court was my filing a half-assed factum," he said. "I was on my third chief justice by the time we actually got it going. One had already retired and another had died."
Through sheer luck, a junior lawyer from Dalton's second lawyer's firm put him in touch with St. John's lawyer Jerome Kennedy, now a prominent advocate for the wrongly convicted. Kennedy pushed Dalton's case, winning him a retrial. That lasted nine months, ending with his acquittal in 2000.
New medical evidence overwhelmingly concluded that Dalton had been charged with a crime that never occurred. Brenda Dalton had choked on cereal and the marks on the inside of her throat were caused by attempts to save her life.
Earlier this year, in his report from a public inquiry into Dalton's case and the wrongful murder convictions of Newfoundlanders Gregory Parsons and Randy Druken, commissioner Antonio Lamer, a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, said the cases were largely the result of a dysfunctional Crown culture that was overzealous and blindly accepted police theories.
One day after the report was released in June, Dalton received a letter of apology from Newfoundland's chief justice, Clyde Wells. He's still waiting for one from the government.
Knowing his family was on the outside of the prison walls was how he survived his ordeal because it gave him a focus, he said.
"My daughter had just graduated from kindergarten when her mother died. When I was acquitted, she was about to graduate high school. For me, it was always the measure of how much time had been lost."
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