The Winnipeg Free Press thought that the recent death of a respected Crown prosecutor was a pefect opportunity to malign and defame him with impunity. They didn't anticipate that the vile effort would damage an innocent victim- one of their own.
Katrina Clarke is listed on the FP website as an "investigative reporter." She hasn't made much of a mark at the paper, so when offered a juicy story, it looked irresistable.
"...the late prosecutor is linked to five wrongful convictions involving eight men who collectively spent more than 100 years in prison for crimes they did not commit." read the story.
"... the cases have left a trail of various forms of misconduct — undisclosed evidence, a reliance on junk science and secret deals with Crown witnesses. They have also spawned two commissions of inquiry and required payments of millions of dollars in compensation for victims."
"Dangerfield was an outlier, a driven prosecutor blinded by tunnel vision who was willing to bend or break the rules in pursuit of a conviction."
The story had "prize-winning" written all over it. Unfortunately for Katrina Clarke, she was paired with Dan Lett, Manitoba's King of Fake News. And the story was just another rehash of a vendetta Lett has been pursuing for years against prosecutor George Dangerfield.
Correcting Lett's series of fake news has become a cottage industry for The Black Rod. We'll bet that he didn't send poor Kat to read our stories where we've rebutted with facts his myriad of false accusations against Dangerfield. If he had she would understand why her partnership with Lett was less Woodward-and-Bernstein and more Laurel-and-Hardy.
The story on Dangerfield is a classic case of disinformation, and should be studied in journalism schools across the country.
(For the uninitiated, boiling down internet definitions, the difference between misinformation and disinformation is that misinformaion is getting the facts wrong while disinformation is false information that's deliberately intended to mislead. In other words, intentionally misstating the facts.)
The Lett-Clarke story stumbles from literally the very first words in the tabloid-style headline: 'A century behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit'.
Sounds shocking, right? But is it true?
David Milgaard could say without challenge that he spent years in prison for a murder he did not commit. He eventually convinced a court to release him after 23 years behind bars, but it took another five years before the real killer of a nurse in Regina was uncovered.
The men prosecuted by Dangerfield can't say the same. Milgaard was convicted on the false testimony of some friends and acquantances. In the Dangerfield cases one man freely confessed to murder, two others were convicted after their close criminal associates testified against them, and another was found guilty on circumstantial evidence. That's where the smear of Dangerfield begins in the Lett-Clarke investigative story.
"Dangerfield retired in 2000 and it did not take long for his legacy to come under attack."
"That same year, Winnipeg police announced that after an intensive internal review of the 1981 murder of 16-year-old Barbara Stoppel, it no longer considered Thomas Sophonow a suspect."
"The Manitoba government ordered a commission of inquiry in 2000 that would confirm a combination of bad science and non-disclosure by police and prosecutors kept the case against Sophonow alive."
THOMAS SOPHONOW
Winnipeg Police Chief Jack Ewatski gave no explanation for the department's 180-degree turn on Sophonow's case. But leaks indicated it was because cold-case investigators had found a more likely suspect in the murder of 16-year-old Barbara Stoppel. What nobody reported was that by the day of Ewatski's announcement, Crown attorneys had examined the "evidence" against the new suspect and determined there was no case that would stand up in court, not even a circumstantial case such as the one against Sophonow. He was never charged. He never confessed.
Re-opening the Barbara Stoppel murder. Paging Inspector Clouseau
As for the "public inquiry", it was a shameful parody of a judicial process. The government of Manitoba was so scared that the evidence in Sophonow's trial would convince the public, as it had 33 or 26 jurors, that he was guilty, that it rigged the outcome. The terms of reference were written so that nothing pointing to his guilt could even be raised during the "inquiry".
Even so, the inquiry turned up evidence that had it been provided to the juries, might have cemented a guilty verdict, such as a phone call Sophonow made to his sister, after he left Manitoba the night of the Stoppel murder, in which he asked her "Are the police looking for me?"
A transcript of an inquiry interview with one of Sophonow's defence lawyers, Greg Brodsky, explored that call.
Q. The Crown's theory was that Mr. Sophonow was calling back to Vancouver to basically see if the police were looking for him.
A. Yes
Q. And, in fact, Mr. Dangerfield in cross-examination of Mr. Sophonow asked him that specifically.
A. He did.
Q. Mr. Sophonow denied that specifically.
A. Yes.
Q. And that he had, in fact, not been truthful on the stand.
A. Not been accurate on the stand.
Potato Pahtatoh. Inaccurate or lied? You decide.
FRANK OSTROWSKI
Frank Ostrowski spent 23 years in jail for the murder of an associate in his crug-smuggling crew he thought had ratted him out to police. (He killed the wrong man. The real turncoat tried to warn his police contact before the murder but the victim was shot to death before he could be alerted of the threat to his life.)
The case against Ostrowski was built on the testimony of the man who provided the gun used in the murder, the man who pulled the trigger, and Matthew Lovelace, Ostrowski's right-hand man who arranged the group's drug deals with mobsters in Montreal.
Frank Ostrowski. From Sinner to Saint. Or, What they're not telling you.
Dangerfield's detractors accuse him to failing to tell the court of a deal made to drop drug charges against Lovelace in exchange for his testimony against Ostrowski. What they hide is that the deal was made by Lovelace's lawyer and federal authorities, but the lawyer never told his client and the feds never told Dangerfield. That was done deliberately so that Lovelace could legitimately deny having made any deal for his evidence and Dangerfield could say, honestly as far as he knew, there was no such deal.
JAMES DRISKELL
James Driskell served 13 years of a life sentence for, the Crown charged, the killing of a man he feared was about to testify against him, a man who worked with Driskell in a chop-shop operation where they broke apart stolen cars to sell parts separately.
The case against him turned on the testimony of two men who phoned CrimeStoppers to collect rewards. Both said Driskell told them of his desire to kill the victim and they told police he intended to snatch the victim in his van and drive him where the man could be shot to death. Police recovered three hairs from Driskell's van which they believed belong to the victim and which then tied Driskell to the crime.
DNA evidence years later proved the hairs did not belong to the victim, which broke the link to Driskell.
Another phony public inquiry, this one designed specifically to assign blame to Dangerfield, accused him of failing to tell the jury of deals made with one of the prime witnesses, Ray Zanidean. The deals involved payments of about $83,000 to him plus immunity from an arson in Saskatchewan that he confessed to Winnipeg police. Dangerfield was accused of hiding that information from Driskell's lawyers.
It turned out the payment was support for him through the trial process while he was waiting to get in the RCMP's witness protection program. And the arson charge was in limbo because the RCMP would not accept anyone into their program who would be hiding to evade criminal charges. He was never charged with arson.
Neither was Zanidean charged with perjury. That's something Lett hammered on in a series of stories extolling Driskell right up to the day Saskatchewan authorities announced there wasn't enough evidence to warrant a charge of perjury. From that day forward, the claim Zanidean committed perjury disappeared from Winnipeg Free Press stories.
What also disappeared was any hint of the newspaper's most egregious violation of journalistic ethics. The Winnipeg Free Press literally MADE UP A QUOTE to use in a headline to slander George Dangerfield in the course of the Driskell inquiry. We wonder what "investigative journalist" Katrina Clarke thinks of a newspaper that would sink that low to destroy the reputation of an honest man.
Details here:
True but False: Driskell Inquiry like Alice in Wonderland
KYLE UNGER
We'll conclude with Kyle Unger, who served 14 years for the murder of a teen-aged girl at a music festival in 1990. Unger was roped into the investigation by another young man who was accused of the rape and murder and who said Unger was with thim at the festival. That man eventually committed suicide, but Unger went on trial.
The key evidence against him was a confession given in the course of an RCMP sting. It's called Mr. Big and it involves telling a suspect he's a candidate to join an large organized crime outfit but he's got to prove he's got the 'right stuff'. That involves telling the head man (Mr.Big) the worst crimes he's committed. In this case, Unger bragged about the murder of the teen girl.
Though some of the details of his confession were wrong about the girl's case, the Crown felt they had enough to take to trial. The confession was buttressed by some hairs found on her body and which RCMP experts said were similar to Unger's hair.
At the time police depended on putting hairs under microscopes to see if they closely matched characteristics of the hair of supects. Juries were told by trial judges that the results were only that the hair samples were "consistent", and not definitely the same. DNA testing showed that the hairs used in the Unger case were not his.
Ignoring facts, the Winnipeg Free Press refused to give Dangerfield any quarter.
"This was one of the most important elements in Dangerfield’s attempts to establish plausible deniability on the wrongful convictions: his often-repeated contention that he’d trusted the evidence police had provided to him and had done his duty by putting that evidence before a judge and jury."
Obviously neither Dan Lett or Katrina Clarke has ever covered a murder trial. If they had they would know that after the Crown and defence conclude their presentation of evidence, the judge delivers what's known as his 'charge to the jury.' That's when he explains the rules as to how the jury is expected to reach a verdict.
The judge states that the jurors in the court process are the "triers of fact." They decide what the facts of the case are. Not reporters. Not lawyers, not judges, not anyone other than the members of the jury. They are told 'you can accept all of a witness's evidence, or part of it, or none of it.' The facts of the case are what the jurors say they are. The public only knows the final verdict because jury deliberations are secret. Jurors are legally bound to keep what's said in the jury room secret from anyone except in extraordinary circumstances. What was discussed and how they reached a verdict is the business only of the jurors. The Winnipeg Free Press thinks otherwise.
In 2013 the Supreme Court of Canada issued a judgement that goes to the heart of the allegations against George Dangerfield. We'll quote directly from the Globe and Mail story for it's as concise and clear as we could ever be...
"In overturning the guilty verdict, the Newfoundland Court of Appeal judges expressed concern about inconsistencies in the complainant’s evidence.
"Since juries issue a verdict without reasons, the Newfoundland judges considered the evidence as if they were hearing the case themselves. They concluded that an experienced judge would have found the defendant not guilty.
"Friday’s decision reaffirms the notion that a jury verdict is near-sacrosanct."
Justice Thomas Cromwell, writing for the court, said that jurors have an enormous advantage over appellate judges in that they actually see and hear the evidence.
“The reviewing court must not act as a ‘13th juror’ or simply give effect to vague unease or lurking doubt based on its own review of the written record or find that a verdict is unreasonable simply because the reviewing court has a reasonable doubt based on its review of the record,” Justice Cromwell said.
He said that appellate courts should not only consider whether there is sufficient evidence to sustain a verdict, but whether the verdict “conflicts with the bulk of judicial experience.”
Assessing the credibility of evidence is a nuanced exercise that can go much further than simply weighing apparent inconsistencies or motives to lie, he said.
“While appellate review for unreasonableness of guilty verdicts is a powerful safeguard against wrongful convictions, it is also one that must be exercised with great deference to the fact-finding role of the jury,” he said.
“Trial by jury must not become trial by appellate court on the written record.”
We can only regret that there's no venue where members of the mainstream media can be put in the dock to await the verdict of the court of public opinion for something as appalling as this example of Winnipeg Free Press "investigative journalism".