The Black Rod

The Shadow has a higher public profile than he does. You couldn't pick him out of a line-up.  If his picture has ever been posted anywhere, let us know. What is known is that he's got bigger cojones than anyone at City Hall.  This year he stared down the mayor of Winnipeg and the mayor's closest friend and ally,the city's chief administrative officer, who happens to be the most powerful man in city government. By the time he got through with them, they were sitting in council chambers like frightened schoolboys in the principal's office as they watched their power to intimidate city councillors evaporate into thin air. And because of him, those councillors developed some backbone for the first time in living memory and showed they could take the reins of government away from unelected administrators if they wanted. The Black Rod's Newsmaker of the Year---city auditor Brian Whiteside. Way back as far as last January, Whiteside gave a warning th...

Talk about a rush to judgement ... In a case with no witnesses, no motive, no murder weapon and, if what was presented in court is any guide, NO EVIDENCE AT ALL, the RCMP considered the murder of Beverley Rowbotham solved within 3 weeks. Their conclusion: the husband done it because we can't find anyone else to pin it on and we got other stuff to do. ( See Part One - There must be a public inquiry into the bungled trial of Mark Stobbe http://blackrod.blogspot.ca/2012/03/there-must-be-public-inquiry-into.html ) Now we'll be the first to say that police always know more than they tell the public, and that its a losing bet to armchair quarterback a police investigation on the basis of years of CSI, Criminal Minds and Law-and-Order (all versions). But when they try to send a man to prison for the rest of his life based on a case so thin that it's invisible to the naked eye, the onus reverses and t...

A botched murder investigation. Check A prime suspect painted with a bullseye by police afflicted with tunnel vision. Check A dubious eyewitness who identifies the suspect with certainty at trial. Check An overzealous prosecutor who would go to any length to get a conviction. Check Sound familiar? The prosecution of Mark Stobbe follows the blueprint for a wrongful conviction exactly as writ large in a series of public inquiries in Manitoba in recent years. The only difference is that in those inquiries (Sophonow, Driskell, Unger) the juries convicted the accused on the evidence presented to them, and it was the NDP government that had to concoct reasons, such as those above, to toss the guilty verdicts, hold staged show trials to exonerate the convicted men on bogus grounds, and pay millions in compensation (except for a surprised Kyle Unger who got nothing.) In the case of Mark Stobbe, the egregious behaviour of police and prosecuto...