CTV News: Ivan Henry waits for justice…
February 18, 2013 in Opinion
In a recent CTV News story, BC’s Minister of Justice Shirley Bond told CTV’s Jon Woodward that “there is every intention to provide redress” to our client Ivan Henry.
Mr. Henry was acquitted of ten counts of sexual assault by the British Columbia Court of Appeal on October 27, 2010 after spending more than 27 years in jail. Mr. Justice Low of the Court of Appeal wrote:
” The process of identification was polluted so as to render in-court identification of the appellant on each count highly questionable and unreliable on the reasonable doubt standard. I consider the verdicts to be unsafe.
In my opinion, the verdict on each count was not one that a properly instructed jury acting judicially could reasonably have rendered.”
The government paid nothing to Mr. Henry to compensate him for his wrongful conviction. Consequently, on June 28, 2011 we filed a Notice of Civil Claim in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, naming the Attorneys General of BC and Canada as defendants, as well as the Vancouver police who had been involved in the investigation of the crimes. At a case management conference on January 22, 2013, Mr. Justice Goepel directed that the civil trial, estimated to last 12 weeks, would commence September 8, 2014.