Daily Brew40 years later, Nova Scotia man wrongly convicted of rape sues for compensation
Gerry Gaston Barton wants someone to pay for the four decades he's spent wrongly labelled a sex offender.
Barton, a native of Nova Scotia who now lives in Alberta, is suing the Attorney General of Nova Scotia and his federal counterpart for the way his case was handled, CBC News reports.
In 1970 when he was 19, Barton was convicted of statutory rape after a 14-year-old girl in his Digby, N.S., neighbourhood accused him of raping her and fathering her baby.
But the RCMP reopened the case in 2008 when a criminal investigation revealed the teen, who can't be identified, had been sexually assaulted by her brother since the age of nine. The woman now says the brother was her baby's father but she accused Barton because her father refused to believe her brother had molested her.
Barton was arrested and convicted of statutory rape despite no evidence except the teen's claim, CBC News said.
Now 63 and living in Morinville, near Edmonton, told CBC News he protested his innocence at the perfunctory the court proceeding.
"When I went to court, the only one that was there was the prosecutor and the RCMP, the judge and the family that accused me of this, and my mom and dad sitting in the back," he said.
"They gave me a year's probation, they threw me in jail, my mother had to put her house up to get me out of jail and for what? For what? For nothing."
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Barton carried the sex-offender label throughout his life, making it hard to get and keep jobs, his lawyer said.
"All you need to hear are the words convicted sex offender and I think you can imagine what that would do to a young man's life and all the doors that would close on you," Dale Dunlop told CBC News.
Things changed when the woman came forward in 2008 and admitted the truth.
"The RCMP obtained DNA samples from all involved and testing overwhelmingly eliminated Mr. Barton as the father of the child born to the complainant," reads one court decision reported by CBC News.
"These tests also overwhelmingly indicated that the complainant's brother was the father of the child."
In 2011, Nova Scotia's Court of Appeal officially quashed Barton's conviction, calling it a "miscarriage of justice."
But apparently that's not enough to automatically entitle Barton to compensation as far as the Nova Scotia government is concerned.
"There's a lot more to it than just saying that police did something or someone else didn't do something," Justice Minister Ross Landry said. "It's a matter of getting the full picture and understanding how that occurred."
Both Nova Scotia and the federal government, which has jurisdiction over the RCMP, are fighting Barton's attempt to sue them for malicious prosecution and negligent police investigation.
They lost a round last week when a Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge ruled the suit could go ahead, CBC News said.
"I have borne in mind the overall context of this case where there has been a wrongful conviction, now recognized to have been a miscarriage [of] justice, that occurred at the hands of the RCMP and the Crown prosecutor involved in the case some 43 years ago," Justice Robert Wright said in his decision.
Nova Scotia has learned nothing since the Donald Marshall case in 1971, Dunlop suggested.
Marshall, an 17-year-old aboriginal from Sydney, N.S., was convicted of murdering a teenage friend. An appeal overturned the verdict but also absolved the authorities of responsibility for a miscarriage of justice, putting some of the blame on Marshall, who'd had previous run-ins with police. It would take a royal commission to exonerate him in 1990.
“I would hope with Donald Marshall and our history of mistreatment of minorities that things would have changed, but I guess they haven't," Dunlop told CBC News.
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The Marshall case is one of the best known wrongful convictions in a history of Canadian justice is dotted with such miscarriages.
Sixteen-year-old David Milgaard was convicted for the 1969 rape-murder of nursing aide Gail Miller in Saskatoon. His trial featured coerced testimony from his friends and dubious physical evidence from lazy police work.
Milgaard, supported by his mother, fought for for decades to overturn the conviction, which was finally set aside by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1992. It would take a DNA test five years later to finally clear him. The Saskatchewan government awarded him $10 million.
Perhaps the most longstanding wrongful conviction was that of Steven Truscott, convicted at age 14 of killing of raping and killing 12-year-old schoolmate Lynn Harper in 1959 near Clinton, Ont. He was sentenced to hang, the youngest death-row inmate in Canadian history, but the sentence was commuted.
Truscott was another victim of rushed police work. He protested his innocence in vain and spent 10 years in prison before being paroled in 1969. It would be 2007 before Truscott's conviction was overturned in court based on a review of the evidence, including dubious witness testimony and material the pointed away from him as the killer that never made it into the police case file.
The Ontario government eventually awarded Truscott $6.5 million.
