STORY: "Gerry Gaston Barton, wrongly convicted of rape, set to sue.
SUB-HEADING: "Complainant told police in 2008 that she had actually been assaulted by her brother," by reporter Blair Rhodes, published by CBC News on March 28, 2014.
GIST: "A court date has been set in the case of Gerry Gaston Barton, a Nova Scotia man who is suing the provincial government and the RCMP over his wrongful conviction for the rape of a 14-year-old girl more than four decades ago. Five days have been set aside to hear Barton's civil case, which is due to proceed in the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia on April 7.........Gerry Gaston Barton is suing the attorney general of Nova Scotia and the RCMP after he was wrongly convicted of rape more than four decades ago. (CBC) The truth about Barton — now 64 years old and living in Morinville, Alta. — started to come out in 2008 when the RCMP reopened the case. According to court documents, that criminal investigation revealed Barton's accuser had repeatedly been sexually assaulted by her brother, starting when she was just nine years old. The woman told police that her brother was the father of her child — and she had accused Barton because her father was not willing to accept that her brother had sexually assaulted her and caused her pregnancy. "The RCMP obtained DNA samples from all involved and testing overwhelmingly eliminated Mr. Barton as the father of the child born to the complainant," reads one court decision. "These tests also overwhelmingly indicated that the complainant's brother was the father of the child."........Barton appealed his conviction and it was quashed in 2011, with the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal ruling that a miscarriage of justice had occurred.........The Crown prosecutor at the time — now a retired Supreme Court Justice — and the original RCMP investigator are both scheduled to testify in court. "Here's the delicious — and to my mind despicable — irony," Dunlop said. "The province and the RCMP have said to Gerry, 'You can't win your case because all the documents are gone. The documents we destroyed.'" Few official records remain from Barton's 1970 conviction."
