Even if the user name was correct, after a full search turned up no evidence of wrongdoing or behaviors consistent with the allegation, it should have been insufficient for sentencing.
In the UK, it’s because it’s the defence’s job to notice this kind of thing, but paying for a good lawyer is life-ruiningly expensive, and public defenders via legal aid are paid hourly, but have a cap on the number of hours that’s never enough to deal with anything properly, so are either rushing everything and miss things, or are massively overworked and earning well below minimum wage when their unpaid work is included.
I don’t know if the same problems extend to Canada, but it’s fairly likely, as the adversarial approach just inherently means the defence has to do loads of things that would be someone else’s job or not need doing at all under alternative systems, so you have to have a trained professional doing lots of work, and that’s inherently expensive, but taxpayers don’t like spending money on defending people who probably did crimes.
the underscore that costs an innocent man 18 months of his life
More like the shit police work and complete lack of evidence. How the hell could that make it through the courts all the way to sentencing?
Apparently the defence missed it too, which is pretty damning for whoever was (supposed to be) defending him, I’d think.
Even if the user name was correct, after a full search turned up no evidence of wrongdoing or behaviors consistent with the allegation, it should have been insufficient for sentencing.
legal systems in the British tradition have this tendency…
In the UK, it’s because it’s the defence’s job to notice this kind of thing, but paying for a good lawyer is life-ruiningly expensive, and public defenders via legal aid are paid hourly, but have a cap on the number of hours that’s never enough to deal with anything properly, so are either rushing everything and miss things, or are massively overworked and earning well below minimum wage when their unpaid work is included.
I don’t know if the same problems extend to Canada, but it’s fairly likely, as the adversarial approach just inherently means the defence has to do loads of things that would be someone else’s job or not need doing at all under alternative systems, so you have to have a trained professional doing lots of work, and that’s inherently expensive, but taxpayers don’t like spending money on defending people who probably did crimes.