Truscott Vindicated

I remember the first Maclean's magazine article I ever read. Back before it became the flag-rag for the radical right in Canada, when it was something reputable and journalistic.

I believe one of the feature articles from that first issue was a two-page spread inviting kids from all over Canada to contribute verses for the book Alligator Pie, new-released that year. But for once, that wasn't my central concern.

The cover picture was a drawing of a kid on a country road, leaning against a bicycle. And I suppose it was that picture that got me to read the headline, whatever it was. But the sub-head read: New evidence suggesting that Stephen Truscott did not rape and murder Lynn Harper.

That was 1976. Lynn Harper, 12, had been raped and strangled in 1959. In the intervening 17 years Stephen Truscott had been sentenced to death (at the age of 14), had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, and finally been released.

However, he had never been cleared of the murder. He was released on points of procedure, and because of tampered or incorrect witness reports and shoddy detective work by police.

But until yesterday he was still a former convicted murderer. Finally the Supreme Court of Canada vindicated him.

And it kept running through my mind that had someone else (Dubya, for example) been in charge of Ontario's death row in 1960, Stephen Truscott would have been dead and in the ground for 48 years.

There is no room for the death penalty in a just society. Cases like this aren't the example ... every case where there's the slightest smidgen of doubt, and someone still dies for it, is the example. Cases like Stephen Truscott's just hammer the point home.