CANADIAN AUTHORITIES TOO CHILDISH TO ADMIT BEING WRONG

The Crown is going to take another crack at trying Robert Baltovich in the disappearance 15 years ago of his girlfriend, Elizabeth Bain. The Ontario Ministry of the Attorney-General made the announcement yesterday, saying it did so after "very careful consideration." The move angered one of Mr. Baltovich's lawyers, James Lockyer, who said his client should be given an apology instead of a new trial. "It's going to prey on him for as long as it takes to hold this trial," Mr. Lockyer said. He said Mr. Baltovich was already once wrongfully convicted, and it was "typical" in such cases to have the appeals and new prosecutions drawn out as long as possible. "It never ends, they just never, never give in," said Mr. Lockyer, who has represented the victims of a number of high-profile cases of wrongful conviction. "They arrested an innocent man, they prosecuted an innocent man for 15 years and they should just apologize."

Mr. Baltovich was originally charged in the fall of 1990 with first-degree murder. The charge came five months after the disappearance of Elizabeth Bain, a woman with whom he'd had an occasionally rocky relationship. Her blood-stained car was found but her body has never turned up. The original trial, in which Mr. Baltovich was convicted on purely circumstantial evidence, was harshly criticized last December by the Ontario Court of Appeal and a new trial was ordered. The appellate judges accused Mr. Justice John O'Driscoll of Ontario Superior Court of being biased in his instructions to the jury. But the three-judge court also found that Mr. Baltovich could still obtain a fair trial and that a jury "could reasonably convict" him.

The Crown's decision to go ahead finally gives Mr. Baltovich, who has always professed his innocence, the chance to clear his name. But a spokesman for the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney-General said that the new charges shows they feel their case is solid. "The Crown asks whether there is a reasonable prospect of conviction and whether it's in the public interest," Brendan Crawley explained. The ministry could have instead chosen to appeal last year's decision, or done nothing.

Derek Finkle, who wrote No Claim to Mercy, a book on the Baltovich case, said yesterday he believes the chances of the Crown getting another conviction are "incredibly low." "We don't know what happened to Elizabeth Bain," he said. "We don't know why she was murdered, we don't know when she was murdered, we don't know how she was murdered." He said that the Crown will have the unenviable task of arguing its own circumstantial case while also trying to discredit the defence's equally circumstantial case pointing to serial killer Paul Bernardo as the real culprit.

(The idea that the suspect then known as the Scarborough Rapist could have been responsible for Ms. Bain's disappearance was dismissed at the time by police, because that suspect was not believed to have killed anyone. As recently as last fall, Crown counsel dismissed the idea because there was no evidence Ms. Bain was sexually assaulted.)

"Things are looking pretty good for the Baltovich camp," said Mr. Finkle, who is also editor of TORO magazine and has written about the case for the magazine. Echoing the sentiment of Mr. Lockyer, the defence lawyer, Mr. Finkle suggested that the new charges show that certain interested parties can't seem to quit. "There's a lot of reputations on the line," he said. "Unfortunately, [Mr. Baltovich] has to go back to the same system and go through the process, which he understandably doesn't have much faith in, to clear his name."

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