Long and sorry saga (Lary Fisher's murder conviction).

• Author: Mitchell, Teresa

Larry Fisher was convicted of first degree murder in a Saskatoon courtroom on November 22, 1999. It brought to a close one of the longest and most terrible stories in the Canadian criminal justice system. After a six-week trial, he was found guilty of the murder of a young nursing aide in 1969. Justice for Larry Fisher was long delayed but finally served. But the final outcome of this case leaves Canadians with two tragedies of lost lives to contemplate. A twenty-year-old woman died in a horrible murder. A seventeen-year-old young man lost the next twenty-three years of his life to a wrongful conviction.

In 1970, a young wanderer named David Milgaard was convicted of Gall Miller's murder and spent the next twenty-three years in jail. David Milgaard had proclaimed his innocence from the beginning but was convicted in a jury trial in January, 1970, after a police investigation abandoned evidence that a serial sex killer was on the loose and focussed instead on Mr. Milgaard. That David Milgaard is free today is the triumph and testimony of love manifested by his family, and particularly his mother, Joyce Milgaard. She waged a relentless, tenacious war on the criminal justice system that convicted her son. She exhausted her savings, sacrificed her personal life and career and fought with a ferocious single-mindedness to free her son. After exhausting all conventional avenues of appeal, she hired a private investigator in 1990, who turned up evidence that Mr. Fisher had been convicted of six rapes at knife-point that were very similar to the facts in the Miller case and that had occurred around the same time. Further, Fisher had been convicted of another sexual attack on a North Battleford, Saskatchewan woman in 1980, while out on parole. Ms. Milgaard and her lawyers released this information publicly and asked then Justice Minister Kim Campbell to review David's conviction.

The Milgaard family relied on section 690 of the Canadian Criminal Code. This section is entitled "Powers of the Minister of Justice" and says that the Minister of Justice, upon an application for the mercy of the Crown on or behalf of a person who has been convicted in proceedings by indictment or who has been sentenced to preventative detention as a dangerous offender may

* Order a new trial or hearing

* Refer the matter to a court of appeal for a hearing

* Refer the matter to a court of appeal with a request that it gives its opinion on specific questions.

Ms. Campbell...