Lawyer James Lockyer paid tribute to one of his most famous clients yesterday before a graduating class at the University of Guelph.

"My hope is perhaps this time next year we can have Steven Truscott up here and not me; the real person, not the advocate," Lockyer said, motioning to Truscott, his wife Marlene and their son Ryan who were seated in the front row.

Lockyer was in town to receive an honorary doctor of laws degree and deliver the convocation address to almost 200 graduates of the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences.

"It's all very overwhelming," Lockyer said after the ceremony. "It's overwhelming to receive this honour and it's overwhelming to be asked to address these students on one of the most important days of their lives."

Lockyer told graduates the University of Guelph is playing a "major role" in Truscott's ongoing hearing before the Ontario Court of Appeal. U of G entomologists, he explained, studied insects found on the body of Truscott's 12-year-old schoolmate, Lynne Harper, sometime after her murder.

Decades later, Truscott's current legal team was able to use that knowledge "and work it towards the benefit of Steven Truscott."

It is not known when the five judges who heard the appeal will issue a decision.

Lockyer asked the graduates and their families to imagine how Truscott, at 14, felt when he heard the jury's guilty verdict -- to imagine his shame, the fear he felt when he was ordered hanged until dead, to imagine the loneliness he felt sitting on death row for four months until his sentence was commuted to life in prison, and to imagine the terror the boy felt as he listened to what he believed was a gallows being built outside the jail.

Lockyer asked the graduates to do their part to ensure such travesties do not happen in the future.

"We can, indeed, all make a difference, and what a difference trying to make a difference can make to us," he said. "I wish you all the very best of luck."

After the ceremony, the Truscotts, who settled in Guelph after marrying in 1970, said they would not have missed seeing Lockyer honoured.

"As soon as we heard he was receiving this honour we called him and asked how we could be here," Marlene said. "A short time later we got an invitation in the mail."

Steven Truscott said attending the ceremony was a chance to give something back to a man who has done so much for his family and many others.

"When somebody does so much for so many wrongly convicted people, I think it's important that we support them," Truscott said.

"He's not just our lawyer," he added. "He's our friend."