Junk science fails to discount confession: crown lawyer

TORONTO - The study of false confessions is junk science and Ontario's top court should ignore testimony by its leading European proponent, a Crown lawyer argued yesterday in the Romeo Phillion murder appeal.

Howard Leibovich told a three-judge panel of the Ontario Court of Appeal that there are no absolutes in the relatively new study of false confessions, only "frequently found characteristics." He argued that the judges should not accept a specialist in the field on a par with other scientific experts.

In 1972, Mr. Phillion was convicted of murdering Ottawa firefighter Leopold Roy. The conviction was largely gained on the strength of Mr. Phillion's voluntary confession four years after police had, unbeknownst to him, eliminated him as a suspect.

Lawyers from the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, the group championing Mr. Phillion's case, have based a portion of their case on the claim that Mr. Phillion's quickly recanted confession was false. They portray the man who spent 31 years in prison for the killing as a compulsive liar and attention-seeker who was obsessed with attaching himself to "big" events.

In 2003, they commissioned a report from a European psychologist considered to be the world's foremost expert on false confessions.

Gisli Gudjonsson, a former Reykjavik police officer and current professor of forensic psychology at London's Institute of Psychiatry, concluded the 1972 confession was inherently unreliable due to Mr. Phillion's psychological problems.

Mr. Gudjonsson concluded the confession was "probably false," arguing Mr. Phillion likely wanted his 17-year-old lover, Neil Miller, to think he was a "big guy." The young drifter was seeking a sense of notoriety as a way of enhancing his low self-esteem, the report stated.

"With respect, this was not a scholarly piece of work," Mr. Leibovich said yesterday.

Another problem with the psychologist's testimony, according to Crown lawyers, is that it is not new evidence. Arthur Cogan, Mr. Phillion's lawyer at his 1972 trial, called a psychologist and psychiatrist to demonstrate, as a 1977 Supreme Court decision put it, Mr. Phillion's "deranged personality" as well as his tendency "to invent and attest to circumstances which never happened in order to satisfy his desire to attract attention to himself."

"There is nothing of value Dr. Gudjonsson could add that the jury did not already have," Mr. Leibovich said yesterday.

But defence lawyer Phil Campbell argued that juries are inherently biased against accepting the possibility of a false confession -- a bias, he contended, that includes investigators and Crown prosecutors working on the Phillion case. Jurors would have needed to be explicitly told of the possibility of false confessions, he argued.

Investigators cleared Mr. Phillion of the murder in 1968, when they verified he was nearly 300 kilometres away from Ottawa an hour and 45 minutes before Mr. Roy was murdered.

Mr. Phillion's lawyers contend prosecutors and investigators moulded their case to fit with that confession, including burying the key police report and other corroborating testimony.

Closing arguments are expected to conclude today. The judges can confirm Mr. Phillion's conviction, order a new trial, or acquit him outrig