By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 22, 1997; Page A24
With hindsight and under the glare of a public inquiry, Ontario criminal justice officials readily admit that the evidence they used to convict Guy Paul Morin of murdering his 9-year-old neighbor was pretty thin: mysterious moans coming from his house on the night of the girl's funeral, a dog standing at "alert" near Morin's car, a few pieces of fiber that may have been contaminated by a lab attendant's angora sweater.
Their candor, however, is only recent. For more than a decade after the decomposed body of Christine Jessop was found in the woods northeast of here, those scraps of evidence were the foundation of an investigation that demonstrated the power of Canadian officials to pursue a person they are convinced is guilty.
Charged in 1985 with the assault and murder of the girl, Morin initially was acquitted by a jury whose members agreed that the evidence was not compelling. But because prosecutors here are not bound by the same double jeopardy restrictions that prevent defendants in the United States from being tried twice for the same offense, government attorneys appealed the case and won a chance to try Morin again.
In 1992, in Morin's second trial, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
The first jury, it turns out, was right. When Morin's lawyers appealed, they commissioned advanced DNA tests that were unavailable during either of his jury trials. The tests of semen taken from the crime site exonerated Morin of Jessop's assault and murder.
For the wrongful conviction and 18 months he spent in jail, the Ontario government paid Morin, 37, nearly $1 million and commissioned an inquiry that has put police, prosecutors and Canada's top forensic lab under scrutiny. Questions about the procedures used in Morin's case at the Center of Forensic Sciences already have led officials to reexamine the results of as many as 50 criminal cases from the mid-1980s, a probe the provincial coroner said could expand depending on the initial results.
As a daily melodrama of tearful family members, regretful prosecutors and suddenly uncertain analysts unfolds in a Toronto courtroom, Morin's lawyers are using the case to make a larger point about the criminal justice system here: If prosecutors had been bound by the first jury's decision, none of this would have happened.
"There should not be two bites at the apple," said James Lockyer, the lawyer who has been dissecting police performance on behalf of Morin. "The case against [Morin] was always fundamentally weak. . . . It was nonsense stuff. Not searching enough [when neighbors started looking for the missing girl]. Not going to the funeral home. Not expressing condolences to the Jessops."
Yet after the first trial ended in acquittal, prosecutors and appellate judges "thought a person guilty of the offense had gotten off, so they wanted a second crack at him." At the urging of prosecutors, the Ontario appeals court ordered a new trial, and the decision was upheld by the Canadian Supreme Court.
It was not so long ago, Lockyer said, that the justices could have gone even further and actually ordered a conviction. When that happened in the mid-1970s to abortion doctor Henry Morgenthaler -- acquitted by a Quebec jury only to have the Supreme Court order his conviction -- the Canadian Parliament limited judges to ordering a new trial.
James Young, Ontario's assistant deputy minister for public safety and also the province's chief coroner, said such double prosecutions are rare. The Morin case was an aberration, he said, an investigation that began badly and went downhill from there. He said institutions such as the Center of Forensic Sciences already have made changes as a result, by, for example, giving the scientists at the lab more independence from police investigators to prevent their reports from being used improperly. The Morin prosecutors put far more weight on the fiber evidence gathered at the scene than should have been allowed, Young said.
He said police and prosecutors also have changed their procedures, adopting steps to ensure that crime scenes are handled more carefully than they were in the Morin investigation. As investigators combed the murder scene, Young said, some of Jessop's bones were overlooked, and police collected, as evidence, cigarette butts that their own colleagues had dropped.
However, to Lockyer and his client, who has publicly forgiven all those involved in his prosecution, the more important question is why police and prosecutors apparently fixed on Morin as the guilty party, shaping the evidence to fit their theory.
The investigator who managed the crime scene was charged with perjury for keeping two sets of notes on the case; and Jessop's mother testified at the inquiry about the investigation that police pressured her to change her testimony about the time she arrived home on the day her daughter disappeared, allowing an extra 20 minutes for Morin to come home from work and abduct Christine.
Behavior like that can't be changed through official policy, Lockyer said, a point reflected in tearful testimony from prosecutors.
After first saying she remained convinced of Morin's guilt, crown prosecutor Susan Mcalain said she realized that she and others in the case had, in the end, deceived themselves.
"I don't understand all the mistakes we made and how we could be so wrong," Mcalain said to the commission of inquiry. "I have lost sleep over it. . . . I am still trying to come to grips with it. And I am sorry."
© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company
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