The hero like the victim is long dead.
It’s 48 years ago this month that perhaps the most sensational murder trial in Ontario history began. On Sept. 16, 1959, Steven Truscott faced a judge and jury for the murder of his schoolmate Lynne Harper. He was 14. She had been 12. Just two weeks later, an all-male jury in Goderich, Ont., declared him guilty and requested mercy. Justice Ronald Ferguson set an execution date for Dec. 8. saying in part:
“The sentence of this court is that you be taken … to the place of execution and that you there be hanged by the neck until you are dead.”
As we now know, the Ontario Court of Appeal, which heard arguments from Truscott’s lawyers in appeal of his conviction, 10 days ago announced that it would not order a new trial, but would instead declare him not guilty and further call the entire affair “a miscarriage of justice.” Those admissions rightly set off celebrations among Truscott and his family members. The new judgment prompted the current Ontario attorney general to apologize publicly. It sparked speculation about fair compensation for Truscott. And it brought accolades for the so-called “dream team” of lawyers who, many in the media said, had won the day.
Nowhere, however, was there recognition of the true hero in this case.
In 1959, the same year as the murder and the conviction, Toronto Star columnist Pierre Berton wrote a controversial poem about the case. Just five days after Justice Ferguson’s sentencing, Berton composed “Requiem For a Fourteen-year-old.” In his 12-verse poem, he criticized the court proceedings, the judgment and the sentence. He wrote in part: “Save your prayers for the righteous ghouls / In that Higher Court who write the rules.”
As it turned out, it was one of those “in that Higher Court” who deserves much of the credit for Steven Truscott’s recent day in the sun. His name is Emmett Hall and the reason I believe he’s the hero in all this goes back to 1966. That’s when a book by Isabel LeBourdais, agitation on the part of NDP MPs in the House of Commons and the eventual review of the case before the Supreme Court of Canada yielded a pivotal decision. When the nine justices published their verdict the next year, they ruled eight-to-one to uphold Truscott’s conviction. Emmett Hall cast the dissenting vote.
“The argument on the trial itself,” Justice Hall explained to me in an interview in November 1978, “compelled me to take the position that the trial had not been a valid one.”
Justice Hall went on to poke holes in the Crown counsel’s methods in the original trial and the judge’s failure to recognize that fact. He dismissed the line of questioning that suggested Truscott’s intentions towards Harper were improper. He questioned key pieces of evidence involving bicycle tire tracks, the time of death and penile lesions which implicated Truscott. Within two years Truscott was paroled. And soon after, the cases of other “murderers” – Donald Marshall, Guy Paul Morin and David Milgaard – illustrated the problem of wrongful convictions.
For the record, Emmett Hall made a career of taking on unpopular cases. In the 1920s he successfully defended a homesteader in the face of a powerful, anti-farm, cattlemen’s lobby. During the Depression he represented the so-called “Regina rioters” and managed to prove the violence in that city in 1935 had been provoked by the police. And while I think of it, in the 1960s, it was Emmett Hall’s royal commission report on national health care that led to the (originally unpopular) introduction of Medicare by the minority Liberal government of Lester Pearson. As author Dennis Gruending noted in the title of his biography of the man, Hall was an “establishment radical.” Emmett Hall died in 1995 at the age of 96.
In fact, the day after the most recent Ontario Court of Appeal ruling, I called my colleague Dennis Gruending. I asked if he’d received any phone calls or e-mails inquiring about Hall’s role in the Truscott acquittal. I figured eventually everybody would recognize that Hall was the unsung hero. He said that nobody had called and he quoted one of Hall’s definitive comments in his dissenting paper of 1967:
“The only way to deal with an unfair trial, is to conduct a fair one.”
It took almost 50 years, but Truscott finally got Hall’s wish.
