The Black Rod

If you blinked you missed it. Starring Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett and screen veteran Robert Redford, the movie titled "Truth" came and went and nobody noticed. Despite opening in more than 1100 theatres, this certified stinkeroo, which cost $9.6 million to make, has grossed barely $2.5 million. So why mention it? Because its the celluloid apologia for Rathergate, the infamous scandal where CBS tried to influence the 2004 American presidential election by smearing George Bush with a phony story on 60 Minutes (Wednesday edition) hosted by Dan Rather.   When the documents used by Rather to attack George Bush proved to be fraudulent, show producer Mary Mapes was fired and Dan Rather's career was over.   The only thing left behind was the mantra adopted by bad reporters everywhere: the evidence is false, but the story is true. The real heroes of Rathergate were the bloggers and internet commenters who rose up together to take the false story apart, line b...

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...

Winnipeg Police Chief Jack Ewatski made his bombshell announcement on June 8, 2000. He said police were convinced that Thomas Sophonow did not kill Barbara Stoppel in 1981, a crime for which Sophonow had been convicted by two juries. The public was stunned. Moreso because Ewatski (since retired) offered no reasons for his declaration other than saying a re-investigation of the case cleared Sophonow. Over the years it became known that at the time the police had another man in their sights as the prime suspect in the Stoppel murder---a man with a lengthy police record, a man named Terry Arnold. What the public didn't know was that by the day Ewatski publicly exonerated Sophonow, the case against Arnold had collapsed. Not that that was a surprise. The surprise, we've discovered, was that THE POLICE NEVER HAD A SHRED OF EVIDENCE AGAINST TERRY ARNOLD. The case against him was a mishmash of conjecture, fantasy, and rumination, much of it by one of the policemen assign...