The Innocence Project Quebec, a non-profit organization that defends victims of miscarriages of justice free of charge, has led the Justice Department to re-evaluate two cases in which people had been found guilty of crimes in recent months.
The organization, which includes students from the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), led federal Justice Minister Arif Virani to order a new trial in the case of Claude Paquin, a man who had been convicted of two counts of first-degree murder in 1983. In 1987, the Quebec Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal, and in 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed his application for leave to appeal.
A few months earlier, in October 2023, the Justice Department sent the MR case back to the Quebec Court of Appeal for a new appeal. The person involved in this case, referred to only by his initials, had been convicted of sexual assault on a minor in 2002.
Nicholas Saint-Jacques, lecturer in the Department of Legal Sciences at UQAM and vice-president of the Innocence Quebec Project, indicated that decisions of this type from the Minister of Justice are rather rare.
“We are talking about one to two cases per year in Canada in which the Minister of Justice will grant a remedial measure,” he said in an interview.
“For us, to succeed in a case of this nature is indeed a very big victory,” said the lawyer. “In the same year we had two cases, which is rather exceptional.”
Bringing a case in which there has already been a conviction before the courts is no easy task.
“When we talk about a miscarriage of justice, we are talking about a case in which there was a conviction at first instance, there was an appeal to the Court of Appeal and there was an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. And then several years later, we discover new evidence that calls into question the merits of the verdict or the fairness of the trial,” explained Mr. Saint-Jacques.
“These are cases that have been going through the legal process for perhaps 10 years, 12 years, sometimes 15 years, and we take the case several years later and we work with students.”
Since these are voluminous files, student participation is welcome. It is also a concrete learning opportunity. The Innocence Quebec Project has been a course at UQAM since 2006, where students work on real cases of miscarriages of justice, while being supervised by a lawyer.
“It makes them (the students) aware of criminal law, and also of the importance of doing their job well as lawyers, because they are future lawyers who will eventually practice, and then they see that there are mistakes that have been made by lawyers, by judges, by police officers as well,” said Mr. Saint-Jacques.
The Paquin affair
In 2010, the Innocence Project Quebec recovered the file of Claude Paquin, which concerns events that occurred in 1978.
“Just reconstructing the file, redoing the puzzle, it’s very, very complicated, because there are documents that we lost, there are documents that we find, here we are talking about several lawyers who succeeded one another in the file. So tracing all the information, there are witnesses who are dead, it becomes very complicated just to rebuild the file. It took us several years to find the missing pieces, after that to rebuild a story that is coherent, to try to discover why Mr. Paquin is the victim of a miscarriage of justice,” the lawyer explained.
The Project was able to send the file to the Minister of Justice in 2022, who then transmitted his decision on April 29.
“The Minister of Justice has determined that there are reasonable grounds to conclude that a miscarriage of justice likely occurred. This conclusion stems from the discovery of significant new information that was not presented to the courts at Mr. Paquin’s trial or appeal and that calls into question the fairness of the process,” reads the press release from the Department of Justice, released on that date.
Mr. Paquin is therefore being offered a new trial more than 40 years after his conviction. Lawyer Julie Harinen began working on the case while she was a student at UQAM, and continued to volunteer after graduating. Mr. Paquin spent 18 years in prison and is currently subject to release conditions.
The case is expected to return to court next September. The Crown must assess its case to determine whether to move forward with charges against Mr. Paquin.
“Obviously, it’s certain that 40 years later, it’s not the same situation. There are many witnesses who are no longer here. And in Mr. Paquin’s case, the evidence was based on the testimony of an informer. So this informer, if he no longer collaborates with the State, it will be rather difficult to continue a trial against Mr. Paquin,” indicated Mr. Saint-Jacques.
“I very much hope that Mr. Paquin will be able to completely put this behind him,” he said.
The Innocence Quebec Project is an initiative of student Lida Sara Nouraie which was launched at UQAM in 2002. Mme Nouraie was appointed judge to the Court of Quebec last November, and therefore ceased her involvement in the project at that time.