David Milgaard's quest for freedom reached a turning point in 1991, when the federal government asked the Supreme Court of Canada to review his case.

But now, a confidential memo suggests the government wasn't motivated by a desire to ensure Milgaard received justice.

Instead, the decision was a political manoeuvre, aimed at stifling the growing sense of outrage Canadians felt about the likely conviction of an innocent man, the memo suggests.

The Oct. 2, 1991 memo, classified as a "protected" document for the past 15 years, shows the government was shopping around for "some judicial forum" in which to dispose of Milgaard's claims he was innocent of the 1969 murder of Saskatoon nursing aide Gail Miller.

In 1997, six years after the memo was written, Milgaard, who entered prison at 16 and remained there for 23 years, was exonerated through DNA tests.

The memo was entered into evidence at the inquiry into Milgaard's wrongful conviction, which wrapped up in Saskatoon earlier this month.

Although it has received little attention outside of Saskatchewan, the document offers one of most revealing glimpses yet into inner workings of the branch of the federal justice department that reviews wrongful conviction claims.

Advocates for the wrongly convicted have long complained these reviews should not be conducted by an arm of the prosecution, but by a commission that is independent of government and can afford complete transparency in its operations. Britain has such a system.

The long-buried memo illustrates why separating the review process from the political process is not simply "an abstract proposition," said Elizabeth Sheehy, a University of Ottawa law professor who has written on the need for an independent review mechanism.

"This memo shows that there are indeed vested interests manifested in this essentially internal process," she told the Toronto Star.

Selling the public on the government's views about Milgaard's case was foremost on the minds of senior department staff, the memo suggests.

Key to those views was an outside legal opinion the government had obtained about the case in the fall of 1991 from retired Supreme Court judge William McIntyre, who concluded there was no reasonable basis for believing a miscarriage of justice may have occurred.

McIntyre concluded the Crown's case against Milgaard remained "intact" despite evidence that a serial rapist named Larry Fisher had attacked women in the same area of the Saskatoon and during the same period in which Miller was raped and murdered, the memo says.

The former judge determined that while the evidence about Fisher's rapes might raise a reasonable doubt in the minds of jurors about Milgaard's guilt, there was "no real link" between Fisher and Gail Miller's murder.

"Mr. McIntyre sees no value in pursuing a detailed examination of the other victims of sexual assault raised by Milgaard, since those events don't lead to the conclusion that Milgaard's conviction is a miscarriage of justice."

Fisher, however, was later identified as the killer through the same DNA tests that exonerated Milgaard and was convicted of the murder in 1999.

In the fall of 1991, two justice department officials were concerned the public would not accept McIntyre's views. One was Douglas Rutherford, who authored the memo, and the other was Bruce MacFarlane. Together with their colleague Eugene Williams, they had met with McIntyre to discuss the case.

In his memo, Rutherford reasoned that if Kim Campbell, then justice minister, simply announced there had been no miscarriage of justice, that wouldn't be sufficient "to overcome a rising, media fed, public doubt about Milgaard's guilt."

The Milgaard inquiry was told the justice department's standard for reopening a case and referring it back to a court is a belief a miscarriage of justice may have occurred.

The government did not believe that was true in Milgaard's case, but it began exploring the possibility of referring it to a court anyway.

Justice department officials believed that if they did not clear up the notion an innocent man had languished behind bars for more than two decades, public confidence in the justice system would suffer, the memo discloses. "Some judicial forum should be selected in which to air and dispose of the issues raised by Milgaard's counsel," the memo said.

In addition to the Supreme Court of Canada, the options listed for consideration included holding a public inquiry into the case or referring it to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal for a review.

The memo, however, pointed to "a number of problems" with sending the case back to the courts.

These included the possibility the government would not be able to restrict the scope of the review.

The memo suggests the department believed exercising control over the process was essential to prevent the government from being embarrassed politically. Campbell, the memo notes, had previously disposed of Milgaard's first request to have his case reopened.

The justice department was pressured to conduct a second review in late 1991, after Milgaard's lawyers brought forward evidence of yet another Saskatoon rape that bore striking similarities to the attack on Miller.

When Milgaard's case was finally heard by the Supreme Court in 1992, a five-member panel recommended that his conviction be set aside and a new trial ordered.

Milgaard was freed from prison, but Saskatchewan's attorney-general refused to acquit him outright, leaving him engulfed in a cloud of uncertainty until 1997.

So far, the government remains mute about the fascinating memo, which was introduced into evidence at the Milgaard inquiry after Williams, who was in charge of the Milgaard file during the early stages of the review, took the witness stand earlier this year.

A judicial ruling prevented commission lawyers from asking Williams any questions about the document.

That ruling said federal government witnesses could not be questioned about the reasons for their decisions in the Milgaard case, including questions about advice they provided or received.

But Sheehy believes the memo confirms an important lesson she learned in the late 1990s, when she was involved in a review of 100 cases of women who killed abusive partners. The purpose of the review was to determine if they would be justified in claiming self-defence and whether their cases, like Milgaard's, should be reopened.

"The bureaucracy's stance seems to be one of resistance until proven wrong," Sheehy said. "If a person doesn't have a champion and is unable to garner huge media support to generate public pressure, their chances are slim to none."