 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
Jerome
Kennedy
| David
Milgaard Inquiry
| Frederick
Freeman | Gary Dimmock's
investigative reports on George Pitt
-
George Pitt
N.B. to examine DNA
in 1993 child killing
Broadcast News, June 08,
2005
FREDERICTON -- New Brunswick's
Justice Department is seeking to have evidence from a 1993 child
murder case in Saint John re-examined.
Department spokesman Gary Toft
says an application will be filed with the Court of Queen's Bench
to have the Appeal Court release evidence collected during investigation
of the murder of Samantha Toole.
Former Saint John resident,
George Pitt was convicted of killing the six-year-old girl and
now is serving a life sentence in New Brunswick's Renous penitentiary.
Lawyers with the Association
in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted want the evidence subjected
to modern DNA testing.
If the court agrees, the evidence
would be turned over to Saint John Police to have the tests conducted
at an independent lab, and the results sent to Pitt's lawyer.
The province will pay to have
the tests done.
The application will be filed
with the court within the next few days.
N.B. will consider new
probe into 1993 child murder
Chris Morris, Canadian
Press, March 21, 2005
FREDERICTON -- The New
Brunswick government says it will consider a request to re-examine
evidence from a 15-year-old child murder case.
Gary Toft, spokesman for the
Justice Department, said Monday the provincial government has
received a letter and a brief from lawyers with the Association
in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted asking for a comprehensive
evaluation of evidence collected during investigation of the
1993 murder of Samantha Toole.
Former Saint John resident,
George Pitt, 39, was convicted of killing the six-year-old girl
and now is serving a life sentence in New Brunswick's Renous
penitentiary.
"Essentially they're asking
us to do some retesting,'' Toft said.
"We're looking at it and
we'll respond to them in detail.''
Samantha Toole's lifeless body
was found on a riverbank in October, 1993, not far from the apartment
where she had lived with her mother and Pitt, her mother's boyfriend,
in the north end of Saint John.
The little girl had been raped,
beaten, choked and then drowned.
The horrific murder sent shockwaves
through the New Brunswick port city and lawyers acting for Pitt
believe it may have triggered a rush to judgement in Pitt's arrest
and conviction.
"He has maintained his
innocence since day one,'' said Erin Breen of St. John's Nfld.,
who, with her colleague Jerome Kennedy, is looking into the Pitt
conviction.
"He's looking for the
opportunity to prove his innocence.''
The New Brunswick government
already has indicated a willingness to DNA test four hairs found
on the child's body.
The hairs were not tested at
the time of the murder investigation.
But Breen said the request
for a re-examination goes far beyond the hairs, which are problematic
because so many people handled the girl's corpse.
Breen said the lawyers are
hoping the province will agree to re-evaluate much of the physical
evidence collected in the case, including such items as a condom
and cigarette butts found near the child's body.
Since the riverbank was near
a sewage outlet, the items were never tested for DNA.
"We're asking for the
exhibits which were collected by the Saint John police at the
time and not tested and, additionally, we want those that were
tested re-tested using today's technology,'' Breen said.
She said today's technology
for extracting DNA evidence from minute samples is much more
sophisticated than it was 15 years ago.
But Toft was non-commital when
asked about chances for a major re-examination of the evidence.
He said the province has agreed
to check the four hairs, but there is no agreement, at this point,
for any more testing.
Toft said evidence from the
Toole murder will have to be obtained from the New Brunswick
Court of Appeal.
He said the material would
then be sent to the Saint John Police Department who would arrange
for the testing.
The Association in Defence
of the Wrongly Convicted, a public interest organization which
takes up questionable cases, lists at least 20 Canadian cases
of wrongful convictions. The organization believes there could
be many more.
The overturning of wrongful
convictions is becoming more common thanks to new DNA technology
and forensic techniques. There are growing concerns in many countries
about the impact on justice systems.
Some of the more prominent
wrongful convictions and subsequent exoneration in Canada include
names like Donald Marshall, David Milgaard and Guy Paul Morin.
© Canadian Press 2005
Lawyers hope N.B. man
may get DNA review
Chris Morris, Canadian Press,
February 03, 2005
FREDERICTON (CP) -- George
Pitt may soon get another chance to prove he wasn't the man who
raped and murdered a six-year-old New Brunswick girl 11 years
ago.
Pitt, 39, has insisted from
the moment of his arrest in 1993 that he did not kill little
Samantha Toole, and now lawyers with the Association in Defence
of the Wrongfully Convicted have taken up his case.
Association member Jerome Kennedy
says he plans to present a brief to the New Brunswick government
by the end of the month outlining questions and concerns surrounding
Pitt's conviction.
"There are questions about
the validity of this conviction, there are weaknesses in the
Crown case and there is DNA evidence which can answer a lot of
questions,'' Kennedy said in an interview Thursday from his office
in St. John's, Nfld.
"If the system is still
striving for the truth and since George Pitt is maintaining his
innocence, the least we can do is give him the opportunity to
prove his innocence.''
Kennedy wants the New Brunswick
government to re-test several critical pieces of evidence from
the crime scene, including hairs, blood and semen.
He said today's DNA technology
is far more accurate than it was in the early 1990s and new information
may be gleaned from the evidence.
Gary Toft of the New Brunswick
Justice Department said the province is awaiting Kennedy's brief.
The provincial government has
already indicated it is willing to re-examine some of the evidence,
notably four hairs removed from Samantha's body.
"The (New Brunswick) Court
of Appeal still has the exhibits from the Pitt file,'' Toft said.
Samantha Toole's murder in
October 1993 sent shock waves through New Brunswick.
The six-year-old's lifeless
body was found on a riverbank in the city of Saint John, N.B.,
not far from the apartment where she had lived with her mother
and Pitt, her mother's boyfriend.
The little girl had been raped,
beaten, choked and then drowned.
Pitt was convicted of first-degree
murder and is serving a life sentence at the Renous penitentiary
near Miramichi, N.B.
He has always maintained his
innocence.
"If I made a mistake at
all, I made a mistake in making bad friends,'' Pitt told the
court when he was convicted in 1994.
Kennedy believes Pitt may have
been a victim of what is known as ``tunnel vision'' in police
investigations.
He said the Saint John police
force, which took its time responding to calls for help from
Samantha's mother after she realized her child was missing, found
itself under pressure for a quick arrest in a particularly horrendous
crime.
"George Pitt was the perfect
and easy target,'' Kennedy said.
``We refer to it now as tunnel
vision. The police may, as a result of judging the case too quickly,
have missed other potential leads and other potential suspects.''
The Association in Defence
of the Wrongly Convicted, a public interest organization that
takes up questionable cases, lists at least 20 Canadian cases
of wrongful convictions. The organization believes there could
be many more.
The overturning of wrongful
convictions is becoming more common thanks to new DNA technology
and forensic techniques. There are growing concerns in many countries
about the impact on justice systems.
Earlier this week, U.S. President
George Bush singled out the issue for special mention in his
state of the union speech, announcing an increase in the use
of DNA evidence to prevent wrongful convictions.
"Soon I will send Congress
a proposal to fund special training for defence counsel in capital
cases,'' he said.
The issue is especially sensitive
in the United States where widespread use of the death penalty
means wrongful convictions can lead to the state-sanctioned execution
of innocent people.
Some of the more prominent
wrongful convictions and subsequent exonerations in Canada include
names like Donald Marshall, David Milgaard and Guy Paul Morin.
Kennedy said it's too early
to say whether George Pitt's name could be added to the list
of the wrongfully convicted.
"I've tried to ensure
that he realizes this is a tough battle,'' Kennedy said of his
conversations with Pitt.
"His attitude should be
one of cautious optimism because the task ahead is so difficult.''
- Four hairs key to
clearing convicted child killer
- Jerome Kennedy seeks
to have evidence tedted in bid texonerate George Pitt
BY MIA URQUHART, Saint John
Telegraph-Journal, January 18, 2005
Convicted child killer George
Pitt may have been wrongly convicted, says a Newfoundland lawyer
who has been reviewing the 1993 murder case.
"Based on my review of
the evidence, it's a potential case of wrongful conviction,"
said defence lawyer Jerome Kennedy.
He said the deciding bits of
evidence could be four hairs found on the young victim's body
- evidence that has never been tested.
Mr. Kennedy said DNA from the
hairs - found on her right thigh, upper left arm and abdomen
- may support Mr. Pitt's assertions that he did not kill Samantha
Dawn Toole, the six-year-old daughter of his live-in girlfriend.
Even more importantly, the
evidence could help zero in on the real killer, said Mr. Kennedy
in a telephone interview from his St. John's law office.
But he's not sure whether the
Saint John Police Force has kept the evidence.
"I'm assuming they're
still around," he said.
Acting Inspector Bill Hanley,
the officer in charge of the criminal investigation division
of the Saint John Police Force, couldn't reach key personnel
on Monday to find out, but promised to find the answer today.
Mr. Kennedy has prepared dozens
of pages in support of his case and expects to be ready to write
to New Brunswick's Minister of Justice Brad Green by the end
of next month. He will ask the government to have the four hairs
tested.
The hairs were not among 34
pieces of evidence sent to the crime lab for testing following
the 1993 murder.
Mr. Kennedy said appropriate
DNA technology "may not have been available in 1993, but
it's certainly available now."
He said the government "has
nothing to lose" trying to determine who killed Samantha.
Mr. Pitt, now 39 and serving
his life sentence at Renous prison near Miramichi, was convicted
of first-degree murder in Samantha's death but has always maintained
his innocence.
The six-year-old's lifeless
body was found in a flimsy nightgown at the edge of the St. John
River not far from her Bridge Street apartment. She had been
raped, beaten and left to drown.
Mr. Pitt lost all of his appeals,
including one to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1997.
Mr. Kennedy, on behalf of the
Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, has been studying
Mr. Pitt's case for five months to see whether there are grounds
for an appeal under Section 696 of the Criminal Code of Canada.
The section allows the attorney general to order an appeal when
all other legal options have been exhausted.
Mr. Kennedy has spoken at length
with Mr. Pitt, visited the crime scene, and reviewed the disclosure
file, a transcript of the two-week trial and how advances in
science could help the legal effort.
At the heart of his case is
a belief that the police "botched" the investigation.
He said the police were so single-minded in their belief that
Mr. Pitt was the killer that they didn't explore leads that may
have pointed to other suspects.
One example, he said, was not
sending a comforter to be analyzed for seminal fluid.
The comforter became an integral
part of the Crown's case against Mr. Pitt. For one, a square
centimetre of blood on the comforter matched Samantha's. Just
as importantly, Samantha's mother saw Mr. Pitt washing the comforter
at 4 a.m. when she returned home from a night of drinking.
Officers explained that the
comforter wasn't sent for testing because they fully expected
to find Mr. Pitt's seminal fluid on a comforter he shared with
Samantha's mother, Gloria Toole.
Mr. Kennedy said not testing
the comforter means that semen from other potential suspects
was never explored.
Mr. Kennedy pointed out that
many of these shortcomings were mentioned at trial by defence
lawyer Henrik Tonning and during the appeal process by Gary Miller.
He said he'll be able to give
the minister of justice "lots of reasons" to have evidence
tested for the first time or re-tested using more advanced DNA
technology.
"I expect the New Brunswick
government will be very reluctant," said Mr. Kennedy.
This is retrieved
from the internet archives of Dimmock Report which is no longer
available online
Police doubted George
Pitt's guilt even after his murder conviction.
Prison files
show police chief named someone else as suspect in sex killing
of 6-year-old Samantha Toole. Was the wrong man convicted?
By Gary Dimmock Saint John,
New Brunswick, 2002
Months after a jury found George
Pitt guilty of murder in the first degree, city police were still
quietly probing the 1993 rape and murder of six-year-old Samantha
Toole.
Canadian prison files obtained
by the Dimmock Report shows that this city's police chief believed
that Mr. Pitt, condemned to life in prison, may in fact be innocent.
The report, dated August 1994,
was drafted two months after Mr. Pitt was convicted on circumstantial
evidence.
Mr. Pitt, now 36, has always
said he did not rape and kill his girlfriend's daughter.
In fact, minutes after a jury
found him guilty of murder in the first degree, Mr. Pitt spoke
for the first time at his trial, a trial absent of eyewitness
accounts.
"I made the mistake of
picking bad friends, he said. I did not do this crime. That's
all I have to say."
Months later, a federal prison
officer filed a report after interviewing then-deputy police
chief Clarence (Butch) Cogswell, since promoted to chief of police
for his impressive record.
"[Mr. Cogswell] believes
that Pitt may not have committed the murder, federal corrections
official Brian MacKenzie wrote of the deputy police chief's professional
opinion, and stated that information did not come out in court
and [Mr. Pitt] refused to take the stand as he felt he would
never be found guilty.
In the interview, the police
chief also disclosed that city police were still investigating
the high-profile slaying, a crime widely believed to have been
solved at the time.
More, deputy police chief said
a drinking buddy of Mr. Pitt's may in fact be responsible for
the killing of the North End girl.
"The Saint John Police
are still investigating this murder and [Mr. Cogswell] feels
that [a friend of Mr. Pitt's] may be responsible for the murder,
the federal prison official wrote.
It was a drinking buddy of
Mr. Pitt's who admitted to committing perjury at the three-week
long trial last year.
Steve Miller testified that
on the morning after young Samantha's body was found, his friend
Mr. Pitt dashed out the back door when police arrived at his
late father's apartment.
But at the preliminary inquiry,
Mr. Miller had told the court that Mr.Pitt was not even at the
apartment when police began pounding at the door. Mr. Miller
also lied to police about where he was on the evening of Oct.
2, 1993, the night before the little girl was discovered to be
missing.
That was the night Mr. Miller
spent hours drinking with Mr. Pitt and Joe Levesque, a convicted
murderer on parole for life.
In a statement to police, Mr.
Miller said he went straight home after drinking with his buddies.
It would be days before Mr.
Miller told police that, in fact, he went to a nightclub with
Mr. Pitt, not home. Both Mr. Miller and Mr. Levesque told the
court they suffered from blackouts and could not remember the
night's events clearly. According to the August 1994 prison report,
two drinking buddies were prepared to pay money and drugs to
have [Mr. Pitt] killed. Information for the report was gathered
to assist prison officials in a review of Mr. Pitt's application
for a voluntary transfer out of Canada's Maritime region.
"Writer spoke to Deputy
Chief Butch Cogswell of the Saint John City Police by way of
a telephone conversation initiated by myself, the prison official
wrote.
"Deputy Chief Cogswell
indicated he has known subject [Mr. Pitt] since subject was 10
or 11 years old and has always had a good relationship with him.
In the interview, Mr. Cogswell said he believed Mr. Pitt's life
was in danger. He indicated that when he heard this, he phoned
staff at the Saint John jail and [Mr. Pitt] was placed in protective
custody," wrote Mr. MacKenzie.
Feeling his life was in danger,
Mr. Pitt applied for a transfer to Ontario. Mr. MacKenzie wrote,
He feels he cannot serve his sentence in the Atlantic Region
because of the nature of his offence and the large amount of
publicity in this case and the fact he has given a statement
to the police implicating two people.
That statement, according to
Mr. Pitt, was requested by Saint John police about 10 days after
his conviction.
In the report, the prison official
gives a brief background of Mr. Pitt's case, the inmate's education
and his employment history.
The report recommended that
Mr. Pitt be transferred to Millhaven Institution in Kingston,
Ont.
"In my opinion, subject
cannot remain in the Atlantic Region to serve his sentence due
to the heat on him," the corrections officer wrote.
Today, seven years after that
recommendation, Mr. Pitt is still serving his first federal sentence
at Atlantic Institution in Renous, New Brunswick.
In its circumstantial case
against Mr. Pitt, the prosecution relied on one small but crucial
piece of evidence: a one-cubic-centimetre stain of the little
girl's blood.
DNA testing wasn't perfect,
prosecutors conceded, but crime lab technicians were able to
unearth the sample from a larger stain on the comforter.
The slain girl's mother, Gloria
Toole, testified that upon returning home from a night of drinking,
she found her live-in boyfriend washing this comforter.
It was 4 a.m. on Oct. 2, 1993,
she said nine hours before she reported her girl missing.
But another witness, the woman
who had introduced Ms. Toole to Mr. Pitt months earlier, testified
that Ms. Toole checked on young Samantha at 4 a.m. and said she
was alive and well.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police
crime lab experts in Halifax, Nova Scotia also discovered plant
material on the comforter and in the dryer.
At the trial, experts testified
that the samples matched those of plants growing on the river's
edge behind the family's North End apartment where the girl's
beaten and drowned body was found that evening.
Police investigators also discovered
four hair follicles on the body but DID NOT send the samples
for DNA analysis.
On June 24, 1994, after eight
hours of deliberation, an 11-member jury decided Mr. Pitt was
a child killer, not a victim of circumstance. Now he faces life
in prison for the killing of a six-year-old girl he had one day
hoped to adopt.
Found guilty beyond reasonable
doubt, Mr. Pitt has no chance of parole for 25 years.
- 30 -
|
