Wrongful Convictions and the State Risk Harm Paradigm

What has been seen in the last thirty-five years is a significant shift in the psyche of contemporary society. Beck’s theory of “risk society” has captured the concerns of governments and its institutions to focus fears on risks and insecurity. Within the criminal justice context, this has led to the pervasive consciousness that crime has become part of the everyday experience to be controlled by risk management techniques framed within Foucault’s concept of “governmentality.” Crime has become a ubiquitous risk that must be routinely assessed and managed. This shift in criminological thought has also been seen in the move away from the liberal ideals of due process to the favoring of public protection over the rights of individuals found within the normative model of crime control. The problem in this devaluation of due process is the consequent imbalance of power between the individual and the State. Due process rights are enshrined in the Charter to protect against this imbalance and are never more important than when loss of liberty is at stake, most particularly when the errors due to the constriction of these rights contribute to the acknowledged systemic factors that lead to wrongful convictions

Integrated genomic analyses of ovarian carcinoma

A catalogue of molecular aberrations that cause ovarian cancer is critical for developing and deploying therapies that will improve patients’ lives. The Cancer Genome Atlas project has analysed messenger RNA expression, microRNA expression, promoter methylation and DNA copy number in 489 high-grade serous ovarian adenocarcinomas and the DNA sequences of exons from coding genes in 316 of these tumours. Here we report that high-grade serous ovarian cancer is characterized by TP53 mutations in almost all tumours (96%); low prevalence but statistically recurrent somatic mutations in nine further genes including NF1, BRCA1, BRCA2, RB1 and CDK12; 113 significant focal DNA copy number aberrations; and promoter methylation events involving 168 genes. Analyses delineated four ovarian cancer transcriptional subtypes, three microRNA subtypes, four promoter methylation subtypes and a transcriptional signature associated with survival duration, and shed new light on the impact that tumours with BRCA1/2 (BRCA1 or BRCA2) and CCNE1 aberrations have on survival. Pathway analyses suggested that homologous recombination is defective in about half of the tumours analysed, and that NOTCH and FOXM1 signalling are involved in serous ovarian cancer pathophysiology.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U54HG003067)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U54HG003273)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U54HG003079)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U24CA126543)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U24CA126544)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U24CA126546)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U24CA126551)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U24CA126554)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U24CA126561)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U24CA126563)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U24CA143882)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U24CA143731)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U24CA143835)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U24CA143845)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U24CA143858)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U24CA144025)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U24CA143866)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U24CA143867)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U24CA143848)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U24CA143843)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant R21CA135877

The loss of innocence and the pursuit of compensation for the wrongly convicted

Unlike the United Kingdom and a majority of the United States, there is no legislated right to compensation for wrongful convictions in Canada. For those who have suffered tremendous personal and financial damage as a result of a wrongful incarceration, the available remedies include the expensive and time-consuming routes of litigation for malicious prosecution, negligent investigation and a Charter breach, or the highly-politicized exercise of mercy by a government to make an ex gratia payment. While the State’s failure to prove guilt in the criminal justice process as a fundamental operation of the presumption of innocence should provide relief to an accused in the pursuit of financial redress from a wrongful conviction, the requirement that evidence of factual innocence be adduced is a burden few can meet. While the Supreme Court of Canada has taken a broader approach than other common law jurisdictions in allowing law suits to proceed seeking compensation against police, the Crown and crown counsel, the legal doctrines applied have been questionable. The Court has utilized tenets embodied in corrective justice models employing issues of fault, deterrence and vicarious liability which have severely limited recovery for a plaintiff who cannot prove the requisite level of neglect or malfeasance. It can be argued that the more principled approach would be one appropriate to the arena of public law employing distributive justice and strict enterprise liability. The question becomes who should bear the burden of the harm of a wrongful conviction: the individual as the victim of the criminal justice system, or the State, as the party who inflicted that harm