In law school, I had the privilege of being taught criminal law by John Beaton. Professor Beaton was not a tenured professor, just a crackerjack lawyer with an encyclopaedic recall. He was also a stickler for Canadian legal procedure and was always ready with a few pearls of advice for aspiring lawyers: "We do not have a Peoples' Court in Canada.-Never ask a judge 'to approach the bench'.-Never say 'the people rest'." And for aspiring prosecutors he offered this: "The duty of the Crown is not to secure a conviction; it is to present all the facts of the case."

In criminal law, it's the facts that decide whether someone is guilty. The Crown Attorney, as the saying goes, presents her case "without fear or favour."

The role of the prosecutor, the Crown Attorney, has always been contentious in Canadian law. The Crown has an obligation to present all of the facts to ensure that justice is preserved. In those cases where the judgement of a Crown Attorney has been called into question (generally in cases of wrongful conviction), it has usually been for neglecting that duty.

The tensions that underlie the duties of the Crown are soon to be played out in a civil trial in Saint John, barring a pre-trial settlement. The trial revolves around the 1975 murder conviction of Erin Walsh.

Walsh, a traveller from Toronto, was charged (and convicted) for the shotgun killing of an acquaintance, a certain Chi-Chi Peters. Walsh, who had an extensive criminal record at the time of his arrest, spent a decade in prison before being released on parole. In 2005, he obtained the complete record of his case and discovered a report that hadn't been made available to his defence attorney during his trial. The police report, based on a jailhouse conversation, implicated another acquaintance of the victim as the killer. Walsh's lawyers petitioned the New Brunswick courts to overturn the conviction, based on lack of disclosure of the withheld report. In 2008, the Court of Appeal overturned the conviction and entered an acquittal. The Saint John trial is to determine the outcome of Walsh's $50 million lawsuit for wrongful conviction.

The matter at the heart of the case is one of disclosure, the right of the accused to know the full facts of the case before they are presented. Disclosure is not a new matter. It is, arguably, as old as the common law itself. Crown attorneys have always, at least in the modern era, been required to let the defence know the evidence before trial, in the interests of justice. Nonetheless, in the past three decades, the rules have changed substantially.

With the advent of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, many of the old procedures (such as presenting the defence with an inventory of the evidence, rather than access to the evidence) have fallen by the wayside. Section 7 of the Charter, which provides the accused right to a full and complete defence, stripped away the ambiguity which surrounded how much could be revealed to the defence.

The current standard is the trial of William Stinchcombe. Stinchcombe, an Alberta lawyer, was charged with theft and fraud in the 1980s. One of the Crown's witnesses gave favourable testimony for the accused at the preliminary inquiry (a hearing used to determine the weight of evidence before proceeding to trial). She later gave a statement which was tape-recorded by an RCMP officer. At trial, the defence was denied access to the contents of the statement. When the Crown decided not to use the statement, the defence made an application to the judge, who refused to allow the statement in as evidence. Stinchcombe's conviction led to a series of appeals that wound up at the Supreme Court of Canada in 1991.

Writing for the majority, Mr. Justice John Sopinka surmised that Crown counsel not only had a duty to disclose all written statements to the accused, but also verbal statements including recordings. Additionally the Court ruled that the Crown was under an obligation to respect the rules of privilege and to protect the identity of informers. Discretion could be exercised with respect to the relevance of information. The Crown's discretion could be reviewable by the trial judge, who would be guided by the general principle that information could not be withheld if there was a reasonable possibility that it would impair the right of the accused to make full answer and defence.

The Stinchcombe case became an important bellwether in Canadian jurisprudence. The question at the heart of Erin Walsh's civil trial will be, what impact can Stinchcombe have retroactively? Also, given the highly respected reputation of the Crown Prosecutor who presided over Walsh's original trial, it is highly unlikely that the conviction was brought about by any sheer deliberate malice or attempt to skewer the administration of justice.

Having said that, the overturning of the 1975 conviction by the Court of Appeal makes the province's attempt to fight the case in civil court arduous at best. Tossed into the equation are a former Attorney General's musings on an ongoing case, increasing legal fees on both sides and a dying plaintiff, who may lose some of his damages if a verdict can be prolonged.

Against the backdrop of justice not only being done but appearing to have been done, it is time for the province to give serious consideration to offering Erin Walsh reasonable compensation.

Lisa Keenan of Saint John is a lawyer and the former president of the New Brunswick Progressive Conservative Party. Her column appears on Friday.