Mr. Speaker, on October 25 I asked the Minister of Justice whether he would amend article 690 of the Criminal Code to correct inadequacies in that section of the code and in the process that that section sets out.
This is the section of the Criminal Code which allows the Minister of Justice to order a new trial when a person has been sent to prison wrongly, unjustly, due to a mistake, due to false evidence, due to the fact that evidence has been hidden, and so on. There have been many criticisms of the article in recent years.
We are all familiar with how the article has been used. It was used in the case of Donald Marshall who was in prison for 10 years for a crime he did not commit. It was used by David Milgaard who was in prison for 23 years and found to have been convicted on false evidence.
We have seen this happen in other countries too. Recently many of us saw the film In the Name of the Father about the Gilford four in England, the Irish people who were convicted by rigged evidence. It took them considerable time to have their case reviewed and to be released from prison. In the United States there is a famous case of Rubin Carter who was in prison for a long time and then released because it was found that there was a mistake.
This is the article that gives the Minister of Justice the power to order a new trial when it is found that a mistake has been made or false evidence or hidden evidence or new evidence has been brought to light.
But the criticism is that while this is in principle a very good process, it is inadequate in that the delays are inordinately long. It took a considerable period of time for Donald Marshall and David Milgaard to take advantage of that section. The delays carried on and on.
Second, the whole process is carried on in secret and there is no accountability by the Minister of Justice and those who help him with these cases with respect to the public.
Third, the Attorney General in these matters serves both as the judge on those applications and the prosecutor and consequently there is a bit of incompatibility.
Finally the criteria for what will constitute sufficient new evidence or a mistake for release are vague and have varied from Ministers of Justice.
There have been several proposals to correct this. The major ones recently have been put forward by an organization called the association in defence of the wrongly convicted. The short word for that organization is AIDWYC. It had a conference in Toronto last February where they proposed certain changes to article 690 to make it more acceptable to take care of those, to have the whole process done in a much quicker way, to have it more accountable, to have it more objective and so on.
When will the Minister of Justice bring in changes to article 690 to accomplish some of the goals that have been put to him by such organizations as AIDWYC?