UN looking into appalling parody of justice in Quebec

A bitch of a female (feminist?) judge relied on a female victim's testimony to the exclusion of five other witnesses! And Quebec authorities don't seem to think that they have got anything to compensate

The United Nations is investigating whether a Quebec man should be compensated for being imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. Michel Dumont, 46, spent several years in jail for sexually assaulting a Boisbriand woman. He was ultimately acquitted of the crime, and now wants compensation. The United Nations Human Rights Commission is seeking information about Dumont and his conviction from the province.

Dumont says the fact that the UN is showing an interest in his case proves that persistence pays off. He's been arguing his innocence since he was first accused of the crime in 1990. Dumont insists he was convicted even though he had alibis and the victim repeatedly told the courts he was not the right man.

Although the Quebec court of appeal did acquit him of the crime, Dumont says he was never offered government compensation. He hopes the United Nations investigation will rectify that. The province is not commenting.

Report here

Background here:

Two women entered Michel Dumont's life and changed it forever. The first one accused him of rape, and nearly destroyed him. The second refused to believe it, and saved him by proving his innocence. Last week, the Quebec Court of Appeal acquitted Mr. Dumont of the rape conviction that had hung over his head for a decade. The 41-year-old electrician wept at the news, knowing he had spent nearly three tormented years in jail for a crime he didn't commit. "I was waiting for the moment for so long," he recalled in an interview. "They were 10 lost years."

Mr. Dumont's ordeal began in 1990 in Boisbriand, a bedroom community north of Montreal, where Danielle Lechasseur was raped in her apartment after coming home from mass. She turned to police, but they didn't bother visiting her apartment to collect fingerprints or other physical evidence. Then she picked out her assailant from a photograph, which was based on a composite sketch that she said always left her uncertain.

At his trial, Mr. Dumont seemed to have an ironclad alibi: At least five people, including his first wife, testified that they had been playing cards with him the evening of the rape. Yet the judge discarded their testimony. Relying solely on the victim's account, she sentenced Mr. Dumont, a father of two with no criminal record, to four years and four months in jail. He was released for his appeal, but lost it. Crushed, he left to serve his time at the Cowansville Penitentiary in Quebec's Eastern Townships.

In a world where rapists are prison's lowest life form, day-to-day existence was hellish. Mr. Dumont was assaulted and taunted mercilessly. Fearing for his life, he took to eating his meals in his cell. "It was 'You damn pig,' 'You have the face of a rapist,' " he recalls. "I was living with pressure all the time."

He might have been lost, were it not for a chance encounter in 1992. Out of jail during his appeal, Mr. Dumont attended a meeting for separated and divorced people. There, he met a petite mother of three named Solange Tremblay. He spilled out his story and braced himself for the worst. Here was a man convicted by a judge of forcing a woman into her apartment with a knife and raping her. But something in the plainspoken, gentle-mannered man told Ms. Tremblay that he didn't do it. "It was my instinct, my intuition," she says.

Slowly, obsessively, she set out to prove Mr. Dumont wasn't the rapist the courts said he was. A woman who described her occupation until then as raising her children, she began poring over 1,300 pages of court transcripts and police reports. She wrote down inconsistencies by hand. She began to rise in the middle of the night as ideas popped into her head. And she began writing a series of 17 letters to Justice Minister Allan Rock and his successor, Anne McLellan, beseeching them to believe that Mr. Dumont had been wrongly convicted. "I just had to get him out of jail. I wanted him next to me," she says. "And I knew that if I didn't do it, no one would."

With legal costs mounting, she cashed in the $10,000 registered retirement savings plan that she'd scraped together from her last job as a labourer in a lamp-fixture factory. One day, while visiting Mr. Dumont in jail, she proposed through the visitors' partition. They married just before Christmas in the prison chapel, and she dressed in white. "I wanted him to know there was a woman who loved him and was waiting for him," she says.

Meanwhile, the other woman in Mr. Dumont's life was having a change of heart. Only two years after fingering Mr. Dumont as her assailant, she spotted a man in a video store who was "Mr. Dumont's double." Alarmed, she contacted the prosecutor and gave a sworn statement to police. "From that moment on, I started to have doubts," Ms. Lechasseur later recounted. "I was very scared because it became clear . . . that Michel Dumont wasn't the one." The crucial information was supposedly passed on to Mr. Dumont's defence lawyer. Yet inexplicably, it was not raised at his appeal.

Ms. Lechasseur's qualms continued to haunt her. She expressed her doubts about Mr. Dumont's guilt five separate times. Then, in May 1997, a television crew asked to her come along to meet Mr. Dumont as he was being released. She saw him at the prison gate. "I cannot believe that someone with so much goodness in his face could have spent so many years in prison when he wasn't the one, and when I kept saying so," she said.

Mr. Dumont still bore the stigma of his rape conviction, and Ms. Tremblay kept up her campaign to clear his name. Finally, it got results. Last fall, the Justice Minister, Ms. McLellan, referred his case to the Court of Appeal in light of Ms. Lechasseur's repeated expressions of doubt. Ms. McLellan invoked the so-called mercy clause of the Criminal Code, an extraordinary measure of last recourse designed to avoid a miscarriage of justice when all conventional routes have been exhausted. On Feb. 22, the court ruled. The victim's doubts constituted fresh evidence. The man who'd been labelled for 10 years, was innocent.



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