Ottawa's new bill offers hope to the wrongfully convicted: Opinion co-authored by co-founders of the Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions

In an op-ed published in the Globe and Mail on Feb. 21, co-founders of the Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions, Professor Kent Roach, Amanda Carling (JD 2012), Jessie Stirling (JD 2020), and Joel Voss (JD 2020), introduce the Registry and suggest one priority for the proposed Miscarriage of Justice Review Commission should be to reach out to those who felt they had no choice but to plead guilty. They write: 

A striking finding in the registry is that 18 per cent of remedied wrongful convictions involved guilty pleas where there were no trials.

False guilty pleas may strike you as absurd. Why would someone plead guilty to something they did not do or that did not happen? Yet our findings indicate that the Canadian rate of false guilty pleas is identical to that found in the U.K.’s registry.

We should resist the tendency to blame people for pleading guilty. Almost invariably, they were offered deals that they felt they could not refuse.

Read the full opinion in the Globe and Mail