The brutal slaying of an innocent girl, a carefree boy, a bicycle, a dispute over times and distances, a bunch of children testifying without knowing their rights, a biased judge and jury, and a small town in shock all combined to condemn Steven Truscott to hang in 1959.
For me this was a reread, having read it when it first was published. But that was the 2001 edition, published before his final long-delayed 2007 exoneration in the Ontario Court of Appeal. This was instigated long after he had been released on parole and had worked as a mechanic, married and become a father and grandfather. The justice system had disappointed him so often that he was reluctant to appeal to it one final time but his never-tiring wife was determined to clear his name once and for all. She was greatly assisted in that final push by the AIDWYC, The Association in Defence of The Wrongly Convicted, now renamed Innocence Canada, which had already aided in exonerating several others, including Paul Morin, David Milligan, and Donald Marshall.
This is not a fun read but an important reminder that our justice system is fallible and sometimes deliberately distorts facts to obtain a conviction. It is a documentation of how seriously it can go awry when there is public pressure to find a criminal to convict and the police deploy tunnel-vision, even when there is another known far more likely suspect.
I am the same age as Truscott and also grew up not far from where Lynne Harper was brutally killed, and knew the area and several of the witnesses, including Dr. John Penistan, whose deeply-flawed testimony was crucial in Truscott’s hasty early trial. I am glad I was not closer to the scene or it could have been me that spent years as a convicted murderer. This book also amply details the pseudoscience of much of psychiatry- as many as 14 psychiatrists attached various mental health labels to Truscott, while those who knew him best, including fellow inmates and prison guards instinctively knew that he was and is a remarkably stable, calm, and stoic gentleman who they knew was incapable of doing anyone harm.
There are those who will still believe that Truscott is guilty- such is the nature of those who have to believe something. But for me, this deeply researched book is absolute proof of his innocence.
4.5/5
The Passionate Reader 