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 January 25, 2005: The Federal government
released the
first national examination of the reasons for so many wrongful
convictions in Canada. This should be required reading for every prosecutor,
cop and criminal defence lawyer in the country. News reports
Klassen settlement | How
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Peter Frumusa
Settlement won in wrongful
conviction
Jailed 8 years: Exonerated by court for Niagara murders
Adrian Humphreys, National
Post , January 15, 2004
A settlement in a malicious
prosecution suit has quietly been reached between an Ontario
man and police and prosecutors who put him in prison for two
brutal murders he did not commit.
Peter Frumusa, 44, of Fort
Erie, spent eight years of a life sentence in prison after a
jury convicted him of first-degree murder in the deaths of a
Niagara couple who were beaten in their beds with a baseball
bat, just months after they were wedded in an odd marriage of
convenience.
Mr. Frumusa's pleas of innocence
were ignored from the time of his arrest in the summer of 1988
until the flimsy evidence against him began to unravel. He was
freed on bail in 1996 and, in 1998, he was formally exonerated
by an Ontario court.
A year later, Mr. Frumusa sued
Niagara Regional Police, the Ontario government and various police
officers and Crown attorneys who handled the case, seeking $6.25-million
in damages.
An agreement between the parties
has been reached, the National Post has learned.
"The settlement is in
the process of being finalized now but an agreement was reached
last week," said Louis Sokolov, a Toronto lawyer representing
Mr. Frumusa.
"Unfortunately, the terms
of the settlement are entirely confidential. All I can say is
that the matter has now been settled. We can't give any information,"
he said.
Superintendent Damian Parrent,
a spokesman for Niagara police, said the force would not comment
on the details but confirmed a settlement.
"It has been handled by
the region's insurers and there has been a confidentiality agreement
signed by all parties involved," Supt. Parrent said.
A spokesman for the province's
Attorney-General said late yesterday he could not comment on
the case and requests for an interview with Mr. Frumusa went
unanswered.
Mr. Frumusa's case was unusual
from the start.
For starters, the victims were
an odd pair: Richard "Hop" Wilson was a 70-year-old
invalid and Annie Smith a 48-year-old nurse he married after
a contract was hammered out by lawyers that would see her care
for the ailing Mr. Wilson until his death, at which point she
would receive a portion of his estate.
The pair met in a nursing home,
where Ms. Smith looked after Mr. Wilson. But the man longed to
return to his home and the arrangement was struck to let Mr.
Wilson stay at home but not forego his daily care. Ms. Smith
was the mother of Mr. Frumusa's girlfriend.
After the older pair were murdered
in their separate bedrooms, Mr. Frumusa was sent to check on
them by his worried girlfriend because her telephone calls went
unanswered. After getting no answer at the door, Mr. Frumusa
had a neighbour call police and waited.
Officers found the bodies and
arrested Mr. Frumusa. His character might have been an issue:
He was a cocaine user and dealer who hung around with some unsavoury
men with mob links.
The evidence against him, however,
was slim; no blood stain match-ups, fingerprints found at the
scene or tearful confessions.
But the court did hear damning
testimony from a jailhouse informant, a career criminal whose
nickname on the street was Snake. He claimed Mr. Frumusa admitted
the crimes to him over the telephone while in prison.
James Lockyer, of the Association
in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, has previously compared
this case to the wrongful conviction of Guy Paul Morin, who was
exonerated by DNA evidence after being convicted of murder in
the sex slaying of Christine Jessop primarily on the evidence
of a man he met in jail while awaiting trial.
ahumphreys@nationalpost.com
© Copyright 2004 National Post
WHERE'S JUSTICE FOR PETER
FRUMUSA?
by PAUL PALANGO
Have you noticed the story
about Peter Frumusa?
He's a Niagara Falls man who
was sentenced to a 25-year prison term for the first- degree
murder of a 70-year-old man and his 48-year-old wife four years
ago.
The case was reopened last
fall because of nagging doubts about the original investigation
and the fact that a police informant says the 33-year-old Frumusa
was framed.
The dead woman, Annie Wilson,
was the mother of Frumusa's former common-law wife. When questioned
by police, Frumusa thought it would be wiser not to say he was
delivering cocaine in Fort Erie at the time of the murders, so
he said he was with friends. The lie helped to convict him in
spite of the fact that there was no physical and little circumstantial
evidence linking him to the crime.
The new informer told police
that the murders were actually ordered by a Hamilton mob boss
who wanted to make an example of Annie Wilson for unpaid gambling
debts.
A most interesting twist to
this case is that the provincial government says it is already
putting together a compensation package for Frumusa.
That the government is so eager
to act on Frumusa's behalf contrasts remarkably with its behavior
in other cases, particularly that of Tony Prete and Gino Turchiaro
of Woodbridge.
Let me bring you up to date
on the Prete case, where there are remarkable comparisons to
Frumusa's.
In January, 1986, Prete and
his brother-in-law, Turchiaro, were charged with first- degree
murder in the shooting death of Aldo Citton. Citton's body was
found on a deserted road near Pearson Airport less than two hours
after he had left Prete's North York house.
Prete and Turchiaro were labelled
as Mafiosi, investigated for almost a year and then arrested
and charged with first-degree murder. In throwing out the charges
at their first hearing, a provincial court judge described the
case as "a microcosm of all that is wrong with the justice
system."
The prosecutors persisted and
convinced then Attorney-General Ian Scott to sign a preferred
indictment against Prete and Turchiaro. They spent almost two
years in jail, then were acquitted in almost record time by a
jury.
Throughout the investigation,
there was no physical or circumstantial evidence linking Prete
and Turchiaro to the crime. Prete did tell a small lie to the
police the first time he was questioned, mainly because he was
scared of them and had a longstanding distrust of police.
As for the police, they didn't
find out until after they had charged Prete that the dead man's
lawyer might have provided them with another motive for the killing.
Two weeks before he was murdered, Citton had complained to the
lawyer that he was afraid of his wife's Peruvian drug friends
and feared they would kill him over money he owed them.
Prete never recovered from
the two years in jail and his staggering legal costs. He lost
everything and has gone almost mad.
At one time he thought he had
Bob Rae in his corner, but that was before Rae was elected Premier.
The latest setback for Prete
came in a letter from Police Complaints Commissioner Clare Lewis.
Prete had asked Lewis to review
a decision made by Deputy Police Chief Peter Scott to take no
further action in his complaints against the investigating officers.
Among the interesting things
Lewis had to say was the following:
"That there were sufficient
grounds for your arrest and subsequent prosecution is further
evidenced by the trial judge permitting the case to be decided
by the jury, on the grounds that there was some evidence upon
the basis of which the jury, properly instructed and acting reasonably,
could have found you guilty of the offence charged."
Lewis went on to note: "Mr.
Justice Watt did make several rulings regarding the admissibility
of certain evidence gathered during the investigation. Some of
those rulings were favorable to you. Those favorable rulings
were based on findings of violation of your right to remain silent
and your right to instruct counsel privately. On the basis of
these infringements, evidence was properly excluded from consideration
by the jury."
Maybe it's just me, but I found
Lewis's rationale reprehensible, to say the least.
There was no evidence, Mr.
Lewis, no evidence! The suggestion that because the trial judge
let the case go to the jury is proof that the police had a case
is even sillier. To do otherwise would have been to overrule
the Attorney-General.
There was no reinvestigation
of the case. All the police appear to have done is gone over
their notes and talked to a few key witnesses to shore up their
original and wrong theories.
The question that remains is
who in the system is there to help those who get screwed by the
cops?
Peter Frumusa is lucky. A police
informer looking for a better deal has come to his rescue.
But what about Tony Prete?
The night Aldo Citton died he was sitting in his house drinking
homemade wine, not peddling cocaine on the streets.
For every dime Frumusa gets
out of this government, Prete deserves a dollar.
As for Bob Rae. It was nice
to see how courageous he was having his picture taken with his
arm wrapped around the shoulder of Salman Rushdie. A good, easy
and meaningless publicity shot, that.
Rae had a similar picture taken
once with Prete, who had gone to him for help.
In retrospect, it looks like
Rae's support and smile stood for nothing when the crunch came.
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Revitalizing the
archives
From 1998 until
2002, injusticebusters was in the throes of identity crisis.
What was it? What were we doing? We grappled with editorial policy
at the same time we were learning the nuts and bolts of building
and posting a website. Once we had a secure, paid site I had
full editorial control, although I talked regularly to Richard
Klassen who was forced to move his family several times and did
not always have access to the internet. Rick's pages: one | two
We posted our
earliest and later actions.
Early versions
of the site can be found on the Wayback Machine.
I began following
other threads to stories of police and prosecutorial misconduct
and the site's character took on another facet: a newsclipping
scrapbook where stories could live longer than they would in
print form. I also began picking up other stories of wrongfully
convicted people. It was an explosion. By 2003 there were over
700 pages. I also had contact with several other people (Don Smith, Leon Walchuk, Monique Turenne, the Vopnis) and kept these stories
going.
It was the
story of the Ross children's treatment at the hands of the Saskatchewan
government which grabbed the attention of The
Fifth Estate.
The civil claim (The $10M Lawsuit as we called it) was only mentioned
briefly at the end of their show which aired in November, 2000.
When Richard
Klassen began to make progress in bringing his civil claim to
court, the government and police defendants alleged he was breaking
the rules of court by publishing discovery material on the internet.
- MacNeil clinic (the document which started it all)
- The Thompson Papers
- Carol
Bunko-Ruys reports
This claim
was absolutely false. However, rather than risk being thrown
out of his civil claim, Klassen undertook before Judge Mona Dovall
to sever all ties with the website.
The court fights:
- Les
Perreaux report
- QB271
These pages have links which
lead to other pages from that era. Now that some of the dust has settled,
I have been going back through the material we had posted in
the early days. In the spirit of keeping the scrapbook alive,
I have been reformatting and placing links. The original material
remains intact. I hope the information, which chronicles our
struggle is useful to you.
The identity
crisis is over. We know who we are --Sheila Steele, March
28, 2005
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