The Marshall Trial

1. What went wrong? In this case many things went wrong in the trial, investigation and re- investigation. The major issues were; the witnesses, the improper way to deal with evidence, and the lack of evidence in the court case. The witnesses that the crown decided to use were Maynard Chant, and John Pratico. Maynard was a delinquent kid who was on probation, and John was a child who was in and out of a psychiatric institute, which was known by the police. The police threatened Maynard of perjury unless he lied and said what the police wanted him to, and they took advantage of a mentally unstable child, John, to tell the story as well. These kids were obviously very bad witnesses and couldn't get the story straight when in court, ie saying …show more content…
The three main things they did was they took another statement from Marshall, they investigated everything from the trial, and they went to get actual evidence to put the right person away. When the two RCMP officers, Harry Wheaton and James Carroll, started off the re-investigation they didn't make the same mistakes as before and started off by going straight to prison and asking Donald Marshall directly about what happened and why he was innocent. These officers took what he had to say seriously, including the description of Roy Ebsary, which they looked into. The two officers made sure to look into all the information that happened in the case previously, including the corrupt police work, bad evidence, clear prejudice and mistreatment. Harry and James took all new statements from the two witnesses who admitted to lying, looked into Roy and his family and ignored the lie detector tests that shouldn't have been used as evidence. The new investigation made sure to fill in all empty spaces left behind from eliminating the false information taken before and they managed to find the murder weapon. Finding this put away Roy Ebsary and was the most important thing to release Donald Marshall jr. from prison. The main difference that the second re investigation had that the others didn't was that they didn't have a prejudice against anyone and just …show more content…
A change that is both realistic and practical can be difficult to think of but the two I came up with would be; to start a sensitivity screening and random observations of police stations and the other is to have more guidelines and requirements on the evidence that is given and proof that you have investigated this. If people had to go through a level of training and screening on racism I think more people would take it seriously as a serious situation, and if there were drop ins, observations, and case analysis for an sign of racism it would keep the police force in line and would stop discrimination like the Marshall case. A big problem in the case, and I'm sure many others, was the fact that no one investigated the evidence that Marshall, and many others gave. If there was proper procedure and requirements of proof that you investigated it, it would show that you've done a proper investigation and you could no longer pick and chose the evidence that works for you. If there were these changes to the justice system I think it would run smoother, stop discrimination and it would stop wrongful conviction and corrupt