GUELPH — Steven and Marlene Truscott were the centre of attention during Friday night’s launch of the University of Guelph’s Truscott Initiative in Justice Studies. But the well-known Guelph couple deflected that attention on to the many people who helped them in their fight for justice and exoneration.

An audience of over 300 filed into a lecture theatre in Rozanski Hall on campus to honour Truscott, his wife and their family, and to be a part of a historic panel discussion that involved two of Canada’s leading legal minds and the man who first believed in Steven Truscott’s innocence.

The event was also a fundraiser for an educational initiative dedicated to the study of wrongful conviction and focused on changing the justice system so that miscarriages of justice don’t happen. Visit www.alumni.uoguelph.ca/cgi-bin/online_giving_secure_truscott.pl to make a donation.

The Truscott family hopes the initiative can bring about policy changes in Canada, son Ryan Truscott said, “so no one else has to go through this.”

In 1959, at the age of 14, Steven Truscott was wrongly convicted of murdering his schoolmate Lynne Harper and sentenced to death. His sentenced was commuted to life imprisonment in 1960 and he spent 10 years behind bars before being granted parole.

But despite glaring evidence of his innocence, Truscott would not have his name cleared until 2007, about three years after Canada’s Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler reached the conclusion there had been a wrongful conviction in the case.

Cotler spoke frankly and passionately about the case during the panel discussion. He acknowledged the widespread anger that followed his decision to refer Truscott’s case to the Ontario Court of Appeal for review, when many were demanding a new trial.

“If I had ordered a new trial,” Cotler told the audience, “I knew a new trial would have never proceeded. Ontario would have stayed the proceedings and a cloud of doubt would have always lingered over this case. Exoneration would not have occurred.”

Cotler admitted that when he first became minister of justice wrongful convictions were not a priority for him. The Truscott case enlightened him. He praised Marlene Truscott’s efforts to clear her husband’s name.

“In my view, a heroine in all this is Marlene Truscott,” he said to loud applause. “Steven had a wife who always advocated for justice to be done.”

Mac Steinberg was a prison chaplain and parole officer who helped prepare a young Truscott for his first parole hearing. He cared for him when he was eventually released.

“Steven didn’t protest his innocence,” Steinberg said when asked why he came to believe that Truscott was innocent. “But he confidently, calmly and quietly said he did not commit the offence.” He added that Truscott was “always the consummate gentleman.”

High-profile lawyer Hersh Wolch was part of Truscott’s legal team, taking up his case in 1986. He said he learned “never to expect rational thought on the other side” of a wrongful conviction case because the system is geared toward upholding convictions, even in the face of irrefutable evidence of innocence.

When it comes to the wrongfully convicted, Wolch said financial compensation is a necessary part of righting the wrong.

“Vindication requires compensation. Compensation takes away that last stigma,” he said.

When it came Steven and Marlene Truscott’s turn to speak to the audience during the panel discussion, they simply called out the names of those in the audience who were instrumental in helping them clear Steven’s name. Among them were journalist Julian Sher, CBC’s the fifth estate producer and author of Until You Are Dead: Steven Truscott’s Long Ride Into History, and Win Wahrer, head of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted.

Ryan Truscott said despite the emotional rollercoaster his family lived through, his parents were also intensely supportive of their children. “They were just always there … advocating for our success,” he said, adding that had the family not “pulled together as a team” they would have never achieve victory in the case.