Bulletin: Gerald Barton. Nova Scotia; Updates in his civil trial; Court hears about confusion over his "guilty plea" caused by passage of time and loss and destruction of key records as trial nears end;

STORY: (April 7, 2014); "Gerry Barton testifies he 'didn't do anything: "Nova Scotia man wants apology for 1970 miscarriage of justice," published by CBC  News on April 7, 2014:

GIST:  "Gerry Barton has finished testifying at his civil trial against the RCMP and provincial government in a case that wrongly burdened him with the label of a rapist for the past 40 years. "I didn't do anything. I didn't deserve to have that on me for 40 years," Barton said in Nova Scotia Supreme Court today. The Nova Scotia man testified that being wrongly convicted as a sex offender greatly damaged his life and career prospects. Government lawyers cross-examined Barton on his memories from decades past.  Family members of Barton appeared in court to support him, including his cousin Mark Daye. "It's hard to watch the prosecutors try to actually stumble him up.  But you can't stumble up somebody who is basically only telling the truth," said Daye. "There is no reason, there never has been any reason for him to lie." "It'd been 43 years. Some things you remember, some things you don't" said Barton. Barton said he never tried to clear his name until the RCMP contacted him.........When he was 19, Barton was accused of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl who lived near him in Digby County. He says he never stood trial and always denied guilt, but was convicted and sentenced to a year's probation in 1970. In 2008, the girl, now an adult, admitted she had lied. Her brother had sexually assaulted her and was the father of her child, she told RCMP. Barton's conviction was quashed in 2011 when DNA evidence cleared him.

The entire story can be found at:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/gerry-barton-testifies-he-didn-t-do-anything-1.2600749

STORY: (April 8, 2014): "Gerry Barton's rape conviction falls apart after family feud surfaces: RCMP Cost. Brent Kelly spent 3 years clearing wrongfully accused man," published by CBC News on April 8, 2014.

GIST: A Nova Scotia man's 40-year-old rape conviction began to unravel when an RCMP officer witnessed a feud over a family's dark secret, a court heard Tuesday.........Kelly told the court he took a statement from the brother making the accusation, who said the family — whose identities are protected by a publication ban — had conspired at the time to blame his sister's pregnancy on Barton, telling police the 19-year-old had broken into their house in Jordantown. Court heard Kelly then took a statement from the complainant, who admitted she lied about Barton and said she had repeatedly been sexually assaulted by her brother, starting when she was just nine years old.  Kelly got a warrant for blood sampling and lab tests confirmed the brother was the child's father, not Barton. "He was 1.9 million times more likely to be the father than anyone else," Kelly testified. Kelly then tracked down Barton and found him at work in Dartmouth. The Mountie met with Barton and his lawyer to get a statement on how the wrongful conviction had affected his life.........Earlier Tuesday, the RCMP inspector who investigated the allegation that led to Barton's wrongful conviction testified he remembers little about the case. Earl Walker Hamilton, who is now 84 and retired since 1986, told the Nova Scotia Supreme Court that he was posted to Digby in 1966. He said he doesn't remember Barton, nor the girl who made the false accusation or her family. He said he didn't know she was the victim of incest and that her brother was the father of her child. In his file at the time, Hamilton said Barton "is a Negro, is not going to school and is of below-average intelligence." Hamilton testified he received the case from Charles Haliburton, who was the Crown prosecutor and is now a retired Supreme Court justice. Hamilton said Haliburton asked him to investigate after receiving a complaint from the girl. Hamilton said he interviewed community members to learn about the complainant before taking a statement from her. He told the court he was trying to determine "whether she was promiscuous, whether she was intelligent and whether she was of chaste character." The retired RCMP investigator said the information was important because of the nature of her allegations.  The girl told him Barton had raped her. He believed her and described her at the time as "of chaste character [and] known to be a quiet girl who keeps to herself." Hamilton interviewed the girl's brother, who turned out to be the actual assailant, but didn't suspect him of anything. The brother told Hamilton that Barton had "had" his sister. The girl's mother also blamed Barton.
Hamilton said he doesn't recall taking a statement from Barton, but he did sign a typed statement supposedly from Barton. Barton said he did not make the statement and would not have used the words found in it.  Hamilton told the court Barton admitted to having consensual sex with the victim, a charge Barton also says is false.........He doesn't know what happened to his notebooks from the time and said the file would have been destroyed after five years. The information presented in court this week comes from some police files and the preliminary inquiry from the original case. Hamilton said he investigated the case alone, apart from having another officer witness one statement.  The government has refused to apologize to Barton or discuss compensation. The government says few records remain from his 1970 conviction."

The entire story can be found at:

 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/gerry-barton-s-rape-conviction-falls-apart-after-family-feud-surfaces-1.2602243

STORY: "Wronful conviction lawsuit changed at last minute to drop Nova Scotia crown," published by Canadian Press on April 10, 2014.

GIST: "On Wednesday, former Crown attorney Charles Haliburton testified that Barton had pleaded guilty to the charge just as his trial was about to begin on Jan. 14, 1970. Barton, now 64, maintains he did not plead guilty.........On Wednesday, former Crown attorney Charles Haliburton testified that Barton had pleaded guilty to the charge just as his trial was about to begin on Jan. 14, 1970. Barton, now 64, maintains he did not plead guilty. Haliburton told the court that aside from the notation on his file about the guilty plea, there is no record of the court proceedings that led to Barton's conviction. Haliburton, a retired provincial Supreme Court judge, cited documents he retrieved from an old storage room in Digby, saying he had written the following note on one of them: "Guilty plea on trial." Aside from the notation on his file and documents from a preliminary hearing, Haliburton said there is no record of the court proceedings that led to Barton's conviction. He said a large cache of records were destroyed about 15 years ago when records at the Digby County courthouse were moved to Halifax.
Dunlop asked Haliburton why he decided to charge Barton with having sex with a minor, even though the complainant's statement to police indicated that she had been violently raped, an assertion Haliburton did not dispute. "It was the one (charge) that had a real prospect of conviction," Haliburton said. "It's the one that (Barton) admitted to" in his statement to police. Earlier in the trial, Barton told the court that the statement attributed to him was a fabrication. In it, Barton is quoted as saying he had consensual sex with a 14-year-old girl at her home in Jordantown in 1969, but he testified Monday that he never spoke to any officers.........Outside court on Wednesday, Dunlop was asked if it was possible that Barton's lawyer at the time had advised his client to plead guilty before trial in a bid to get a reduced sentence. "That clearly would have been a possibility, but it would be just guessing now to say that that happened," he said.

The entire story can be found at:

  http://www.vancouversun.com/news/national/Wrongful+conviction+lawsuit+changed+last+minute+drop+Nova/9723366/story.html

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: 
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http://smithforensic.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-charles-smith-award-presented-to_28.html
 
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Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog.