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Court System Flaws

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The Canadian court system, like anything made by man, has flaws. One of these flaws is the wrongful conviction of many men and women like David Milgaard and Steven Truscott. These innocent men spent years of their life behind bars because of the court system, serving the sentence for a crime they did not commit.
David Milgaard, a sixteen year old boy, was accused for murder and rape of a twenty two year old nurse, Gail Miller. Before the murder of the nurse, Milgaard and his two friends, Ron Wilson and Nichol John, had gone on a trip to Alberta. They stopped at a friend's house, Shorty Cadrain, to pick him up. After returning from their trip to Alberta, Cadrain heard about a two thousand dollar reward for anyone who had information about …show more content…

Wilson and John were honest just like Milgaard was when they were being questioned by the police at first, and they told the police that Milgaard was with them the whole time and he had not committed the crime. But as the police's investigation got more intense, Wilson and John started to twist up the story, and John told the police that she saw Milgaard stabbing Miller that night. With all that information and John being an eyewitness as she told his false statement to the police, Milgaard was charged for the murder of the nurse. Milgaard was then on trial for two weeks starting from May 1969 and his three friends were the ones who caused the most damage to his case because of their false testimony. There were two other men who gave their testimonies in the court against Milgaard. They were Craig Melnyk, 17 and George Lapchuk, 18, who stated that Milgaard confessed to them about murdering Miller and he was also going to show them how he had killed her. On May 30, 1969 Milgaard got a life sentence, accused of a crime he did not commit but the serial killer, Larry Fisher had committed, but police were not aware of this yet. A year after Millers murder, on January 1970, the jury was …show more content…

This flaw affects an individual’s life drastically because it causes them to loose so many years of their life behind prison bars for a crime they did not commit. There are many reasons for why the Canadian Court system has the flaw of wrongful convictions such as: eyewitness misidentification, where the witness may claim to have seen something but their minds understand the situations wrongs, or like in Milgaard’s case, witnesses may give false eyewitness identification, just like John did, stating he had seen Milgaard stab the nurse. Error in forensic science is another reason for wrongful convictions. Just like in Truscott’s case, during the time, there was not enough science knowledge to investigate Lynne Harper’s body, and the found information was false evidence. False testimony is a major factor in wrongful convictions because when someone gives false testimonies, they make the case even more difficult for the wrongly accused person. In Milgaard's case, his friends who gave false testimony, switching up the story of what had actually happened the night of the murder, was a major reason why Milgaard had to serve sentence for a crime he did not commit. Tunnel vision was a major factor in Truscott’s case that caused him to be sentenced. The police only focused on him as a suspect and did not regard anything else or try to investigate upon anything

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