N.L. government paying $750,000 to man who waited 8 years for appeal
Saturday, October 27
- Organization: Canadian Press
Justice Minister Tom Osborne announced the so-called "ex-gratia" payment Friday, saying he hopes it helps bring closure to Dalton and his family for their ordeal.
"No individual should languish such a lengthy period in prison awaiting an appeal," he said in a release.
Dalton was convicted in 1989 of strangling his wife, Brenda, who he maintained choked on cereal. Despite filing an appeal only weeks after his conviction, he waited almost nine years before the Appeal Court heard a new trial.
An ex-gratia payment is a legal term for monies given voluntarily without the giver recognizing any liability or legal obligation.
In 2006, former Supreme Court justice Antonio Lamer concluded after an inquiry that Dalton and two others wrongly convicted of murder, Randy Druken and Gregory Parsons, were the victims of overzealous prosecutors who had readily accepted police investigations plagued by "tunnel vision."
Druken, who was wrongly convicted in 1993 of murdering his girlfriend, was given $2 million in compensation. He was imprisoned for more than six years before he was granted an appeal in 1999.
Parsons received $1.3 million after he was wrongfully convicted in the January 1991 stabbing death of his mother. In 1994, a jury convicted him of second-degree murder, but he was later exonerated by DNA evidence and formally acquitted in 1998.
