Truscott acquitted of 48-year-old murder conviction

By Jonathan Spicer

TORONTO (Reuters) - A Canadian man who was sentenced to hang for murder nearly 50 years ago was acquitted on Tuesday by an appeal court, which described the original sentence as a miscarriage of justice.

The Ontario Court of Appeal overturned Steven Truscott's 1959 conviction in the rape and murder of a 12-year-old classmate in small-town southwestern Ontario. He was 14 at the time, and became Canada's youngest death-row inmate.

"The court unanimously holds that the conviction of Mr. Truscott was a miscarriage of justice, and must be quashed," it said. "We are satisfied that if a new trial were possible, an acquittal would clearly be the more likely result."

Truscott's sentence for the murder of Lynne Harper was later commuted to life in prison, and he was quietly released after 10 years behind bars.

He always insisted he was innocent.

"I never in my wildest dreams expected, in my lifetime, for this to come true," the soft-spoken Truscott told reporters in Toronto after the ruling. "As far as I'm concerned, I'm cleared."

Truscott had become a cause celebre for champions of the wrongly convicted, particularly after he emerged from seclusion in 2000 and spoke out about the case. That sparked a new public campaign that prompted the government to reopen the issue.

Then-Justice Minister Irwin Cotler conceded in 2004 that Truscott was likely wrongfully convicted and referred the case to the Ontario Court of Appeal.

The court began hearings last year, and Truscott's lawyers introduced expert witnesses, fresh forensic evidence, and older evidence not available to defense lawyers either at the original trial or at a Supreme Court review seven years later.

Truscott's defense team had hoped the court would also declare Truscott innocent. But legal commentators widely held this to be unlikely.

Harper's body was discovered in a woods near the small southwestern Ontario town of Clinton. She had been raped and strangled.

Police suspicion immediately fell on Truscott, who said he gave Harper a ride on his bicycle shortly before she disappeared, two days before her partly clothed body was found in a wooded grove.

He said he saw her get into a car after he dropped her off at the highway.

He was charged within days, and found guilty in a trial that lasted two weeks.

A Supreme Court review in 1966 upheld the original verdict, but the case bubbled back into the public eye in 2000, when a CBC television documentary presented new information that key evidence had been bypassed in the original trial.