--------------------------------------------------------------
PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Notably, the Crown never offered the jury a motive. No usable DNA, semen, or other biological match tied Pitt directly to the assault; a used condom recovered from the scene was never sent for forensic testing at the time. In addition, officers interpreted Gloria's act of inviting them in to show a photo of Samantha for identification purposes as consent to search the property and immediately began collecting evidence, despite the absence of a search warrant. Items were collected but not removed from the property until a warrant could later be obtained. It is important to note that George Pitt's name was on the mailbox and that he was actively paying rent on Gloria Toole's behalf, and that he, who had prior disputes with officers of the police force, had not given consent to search what were mostly his own belongings."
----------------------------------------------------------------
PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "Once again, this new member and George’s parole officer were adamant that he needs to take the sex offender maintenance program to be considered for day parole. This result is puzzling for several reasons. Primarily, this very same parole board had stated that an offender does not need to admit to his/her index offence to be considered for parole. This is even more absurd given that George’s index offence is in fact first-degree murder and not sexual assault. Moreover, George has never been charged with a sex offence, nor has he taken a sex offender program, so this so-called “maintenance” program requirement seems redundant. Not surprisingly, the Parole Board of Canada denied his application, basing their decision on the following factors:
0:Refusal of sex-offender programming; 0:Gaps in his release plan, including the board’s assessment that a proposed half-way house placement did not, on its own, amount to an adequate plan for safe reintegration, a concern the board weighed alongside his health;
0Unresolved risk assessments that left the board unsatisfied he could be released without presenting what it called an “undue risk to society.”
George Pitt is 61 years old and is in poor health. He is also bound to a wheelchair."
0Unresolved risk assessments that left the board unsatisfied he could be released without presenting what it called an “undue risk to society.”
George Pitt is 61 years old and is in poor health. He is also bound to a wheelchair."
-------------------------------------------------
GUEST POST: "The Case of George Pitt: A Wrongful Conviction That Refuses to Go Away," by Ethan Scaletta. (Ethan Scaletta is a student volunteer with Innocence Ottawa, a volunteer organization dedicated to investigating claims of wrongful conviction in Canada. He holds an Honours Bachelor of Social Science in Criminology and has spent just over a year working on George Pitt's case, reviewing trial transcripts, case files, and evidence alongside the Innocence Ottawa team, including Johanna Wellige and Judy Chan - work that has motivated him to pursue law school and a career as a lawyer.
GIST: "Thirty-three years after six-year-old Samantha Toole was found dead on the banks of the Saint John River, the man convicted of murdering her, George Pitt, is still in prison, still insisting he is innocent, and still, as of this past August, being told by the Parole Board of Canada that he cannot go home. His case sits at the intersection of everything the Charles Smith Blog exists to examine: a wholly circumstantial prosecution, a demonstrably indifferent initial police response, a defence lawyer with a track record of freeing the wrongly convicted, DNA evidence that excluded the accused without identifying anyone else, and a parole system that treats a maintained claim of innocence as an obstacle to release rather than a legitimate position.
The Crime: October 2, 1993
Samantha Dawn Toole, a six-year-old grade-one student with brown, shoulder-length hair and blue eyes, went missing overnight from her family's Bridge Street apartment in Saint John. Her mother, Gloria Toole, had left her with a babysitter the night before and, after spending a night out of heavy drinking, discovered Samantha gone the next morning. According to George, Gloria had informed the police that Samantha was afraid of the water and avoided going near it because of what she might see or find there – a detail made more disturbing by where she was located.
The Saint John Police Department's initial response was not one of urgency as one would expect when a child goes missing. Ms. Toole had to call police four times over a span of roughly two and a half hours before a city-wide alert was issued. Given that Ms. Toole lived in a low-income, social housing neighbourhood, the police were initially dismissive of her concerns. In fact, officers of the Saint John Police Department could be heard on the dispatch radio joking about the socio-economic conditions of the area rather than treating the call with the importance it demanded.
Several hours later, approximately five hours after she had gone missing, it was a neighbour, not the police, who found Samantha's body. She was lying face-up at the water's edge, fists clenched around seaweed, her face bruised, and a wrist fractured. Police and ambulance personnel performed chest compressions on her both at the scene and en route to hospital. She was not pronounced dead at the scene but the condition she was found in, including rigidity and a bluish discoloration to her skin, suggests she may already have been dead by the time she was located. Because a forensic time of death was never conclusively established, it remains an open - and unanswered - question whether a faster police response to her mother's first calls might have made a difference.
The Investigation and the Case Against Pitt
George Pitt was the boyfriend of Samantha's mother and had actively discussed plans to adopt Samantha; to him, she was his daughter. What came as a surprise to him was that, immediately upon her going missing, police focused on him alone as responsible for her disappearance, and to them, there was nothing he could do or say that would prove his innocence. The core of the Crown's case was circumstantial:
Pitt was found doing laundry at roughly 4 a.m. the night Samantha disappeared, a load that included a comforter and bedding.
Forensic examiners found a small bloodstain, roughly one square centimetre, on a bedspread linked to that laundry load, and a separate, larger bloodstain on the comforter whose origin could not be conclusively identified at the time.
Gloria Toole gave police a series of shifting statements over the course of a week: at first saying she knew nothing, then implicating Pitt directly, then later acknowledging her account may not have matched the physical evidence at the scene.
A family friend was found to have lied to investigators about his whereabouts the night before the killing.
Pitt did not testify at his own trial, later saying he believed the Crown's case was too weak to result in a conviction.
Notably, the Crown never offered the jury a motive. No usable DNA, semen, or other biological match tied Pitt directly to the assault; a used condom recovered from the scene was never sent for forensic testing at the time. In addition, officers interpreted Gloria's act of inviting them in to show a photo of Samantha for identification purposes as consent to search the property and immediately began collecting evidence, despite the absence of a search warrant. Items were collected but not removed from the property until a warrant could later be obtained. It is important to note that George Pitt's name was on the mailbox and that he was actively paying rent on Gloria Toole's behalf, and that he, who had prior disputes with officers of the police force, had not given consent to search what were mostly his own belongings.
The 1994 Trial and Conviction
Despite there being only circumstantial evidence against George, and weak circumstantial evidence at best, George was charged with Samantha’s murder. In 1994, after a 14-day trial, where the Crown presented no evidence beyond a weak circumstantial case linking George to the crime, a jury in Saint John convicted him of first-degree murder. Under Canadian law, that conviction carried a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment with parole ineligibility for 25 years.
The Appeals: R. v. Pitt (1996)
Pitt's conviction went to the New Brunswick Court of Appeal on two fronts; both resolved in 1996. On the first appeal, R. v. Pitt (1996a), there was an application to introduce fresh evidence, including an affidavit from a trial witness that altered her earlier testimony and implicated someone else. The witness, however, subsequently recanted key portions of her own affidavit. The Court of Appeal declined to admit it, finding it failed to meet the legal threshold required for new evidence on appeal.
The second appeal, R. v. Pitt (1996b) was decided on August 22, 1996, and was Pitt's substantive appeal against conviction. He argued the trial judge had erred in several of the jury instructions: on how to weigh circumstantial evidence, on witness identification, on jury unanimity, and on inferences of “consciousness of guilt” the Crown had invited jurors to draw from Pitt's post-disappearance conduct. The Court of Appeal rejected each ground and dismissed the appeal, leaving the conviction intact.
Renewed Scrutiny: 2004–Present
The case might have ended there had it not been revived a decade later by investigative reporter Gary Dimmock of the Ottawa Citizen. In a July 2004 feature headlined “Presumed Guilty,” Dimmock reported on a previously secret Correctional Service of Canada document showing that Saint John police had continued quietly investigating the murder for months after Pitt's conviction, and that the police chief at the time reportedly suspected someone other than Pitt (Dimmock, 2004).
That reporting brought the case to the attention of Jerome Kennedy, a lawyer then affiliated with the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC), now Innocence Canada, the organization associated with several well-known Canadian wrongful-conviction exonerations. Innocence Canada began working on George Pitt’s case in 2004. For several years, Jerome and other members of Innocence Canada, actively investigated George’s case, sought fresh evidence, visited George in prison several times, interviewed witnesses, visited the crime scene, and poured through trial transcripts, evidence and other documents. Jerome put together a comprehensive overview of the issues presented in George’s case, however, they were unable to find enough fresh evidence to substantiate an application for conviction review through the Criminal Conviction Review Group (CCRG) of the Department of Justice. Moreover, a group of Law students at the Faculty of Law, University of New Brunswick became involved in investigating George’s case. Under the supervision of then Professor Jula Hughes, the results of the students’ investigation helped in organizing the voluminous materials attached to the case but fell short of the fresh evidence bar. Innocence Ottawa became involved in investigating George Pitt’s case in 2023 and since that time, have continued searching through trial transcripts, and many boxes of evidence. They have attended two parole hearings for George at Dorchester Institution in New Brunswick and are hopeful that he soon sees his release - either to a half-way house, or as an innocent man.
The DNA Retesting: 2005–2006
In June 2005, the New Brunswick government agreed to have evidence from the crime scene, never previously tested, sent for up-to-date DNA analysis. This included four strands of hair recovered from Samantha's body, her nightgown, and body swabs. The results excluded Pitt. The DNA recovered from the tested items belonged only to Samantha herself, not to Pitt, and not to any other identified individual.
Who Is George Pitt? A Childhood Immersed in Institutional Failure
Regardless of George’s journey to prove his innocence, Pitt's own history is a case study in how New Brunswick's child-welfare and youth-justice systems failed a generation of vulnerable boys. Pitt was one of five children born to a father, described as violent and alcoholic. The family home burned down when George was seven. Rather than being placed in foster care, he was sent to an orphanage, where he claims to have been beaten and molested. He stopped attending school at eleven and was charged with truancy; after a second truancy charge, he was sentenced to three months in a youth facility outside Fredericton, the New Brunswick Training School at Kingsclear (Dimmock, 2005).
That single detail connects Pitt's story to one of the darkest institutional-abuse scandals in New Brunswick history. Kingsclear's guard, Karl Toft, pleaded guilty in 1992 to 34 sexual offences against boys in his care and later admitted to as many as 200 assaults spanning the 1960s to the 1980s (CBC News, 2007; The Globe and Mail, 2004). George Pitt was one of Toft's victims, raped at least fifteen times while detained there as a child (Dimmock, 2005). He has said that when he was released, he began drinking to cope, and that alcohol, drug use, overdoses, and suicide attempts followed through his adolescence and adulthood. By the time of his arrest for Samantha Toole's murder, Pitt had already been in and out of custody since the age of eleven and had lived largely on welfare (Dimmock, 2005).
George, as a result, has experienced ongoing struggles with mental health and physical harm during his incarceration for the Toole murder, struggles he attributes to what he describes as the system's refusal to seriously examine his wrongful-conviction claim.
Parole: Two Steps Back
More than three decades after Samantha Toole's death, George Pitt, now in his early sixties, applied for day parole. His first parole hearing was held in the fall of 2023. At that time, the Parole Board of Canada denied parole, but George was encouraged along the trajectory he was on, taking programs, and working toward release. However, his more recent parole hearing in June of this year was somewhat different. The first of the two sittings took place on June 19, and it seems a decision was made at headquarters prior to that hearing that George needed to take a “sex offender maintenance” program. This was a surprise to George and his supporters as he had never been accused nor convicted of a sex offence. George was adamant that he is not a child molester but was molested himself and it would be re-traumatizing for him to be forced to take such a program. He became visibly upset at this notion, and the hearing was adjourned to allow for a community assessment to be done; George was hopeful he would gain day parole and be moved to Hart House, a residential facility run by the John Howard Society.
A second hearing was scheduled for August 17th, and a different Parole Board member was present. Rather than an update, this hearing was run as an actual new hearing - repeating what was done in June. Once again, this new member and George’s parole officer were adamant that he needs to take the sex offender maintenance program to be considered for day parole. This result is puzzling for several reasons. Primarily, this very same parole board had stated that an offender does not need to admit to his/her index offence to be considered for parole. This is even more absurd given that George’s index offence is in fact first-degree murder and not sexual assault. Moreover, George has never been charged with a sex offence, nor has he taken a sex offender program, so this so-called “maintenance” program requirement seems redundant.
Not surprisingly, the Parole Board of Canada denied his application, basing their decision on the following factors:
Refusal of sex-offender programming;
Gaps in his release plan, including the board’s assessment that a proposed half-way house placement did not, on its own, amount to an adequate plan for safe reintegration, a concern the board weighed alongside his health;
Unresolved risk assessments that left the board unsatisfied he could be released without presenting what it called an “undue risk to society.”
George Pitt is 61 years old and is in poor health. He is also bound to a wheelchair. He
remains incarcerated, his conviction on the books, his innocence claim unresolved by any court, and his path to release complicated by the very fact that he continues to assert it. It seems as though the Correctional Service of Canada, along with the Parole Board of Canada is fearful of this frail, older man being released for reasons that remain unfathomable, although their basis may be found in the province’s familiar history of putting the wrong men behind bars for crimes they did not commit.
A Familiar New Brunswick Pattern
Readers of this Blog will recognize the shape of this story, because Saint John's police force has been here before, in a case now formally acknowledged by the force itself. In January 2024, Robert Mailman and Walter Gillespie were officially acquitted of a 1983 murder after serving decades in prison; New Brunswick's Chief Justice apologized to both men for what she called a miscarriage of justice, and federal Justice Minister Arif Virani had ordered a new trial after finding evidence calling into question the fairness of their original prosecution (Global News, 2024); both have since been exonerated. An external review commissioned by Saint John's police chief later attributed the wrongful conviction to “tunnel vision,” whereby investigators fixated on a theory early and then failed to pursue alternatives (Global News, 2025; CBC News, 2025).
While this is not proof of anything in the Pitt case, it is a documented, admitted pattern from the same police force, in the same era. Moreover, it is precisely the kind of context that should inform how seriously untested exhibits, unpursued alternative suspects, and a case built without a stated motive are taken decades later.
References
CBC News. (2007). Kingsclear report likely won't shed much light: Complainant. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/kingsclear-report-likely-won-t-shed-much-light-complainant-1.637813
CBC News. (2025, March 7). Exonerated New Brunswick men victims of police 'tunnel vision,' report says. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/mailman-gillespie-police-review-1.7477800
Dimmock, G. (2004, July 31). Presumed guilty. The Ottawa Citizen.
Dimmock, G. (2005, June 9). Hope at last, and a bid for freedom: Government reopens 12-year-old murder case following Citizen report. The Ottawa Citizen. http://ottawamenscentre.com/news/20050609_George_Pitt.htm
Global News. (2024, January 5). Police chief in N.B. orders review of force's involvement in wrongful murder conviction. https://globalnews.ca/news/10221852/saint-john-police-chief-mailman-gillespie-wronful-conviction-1983
Global News. (2025, March 7). 'Tunnel vision' of police blamed for wrongful murder conviction of 2 N.B. men. https://globalnews.ca/news/11070810/wrongful-murder-conviction-new-brunswick-men/amp
R. v. Pitt (G.W.), 179 N.B.R. (2d) 135 (N.B.C.A. 1996a).
R. v. Pitt (G.W.), 181 N.B.R. (2d) 126 (N.B.C.A. 1996b).
The Globe and Mail. (2004). RCMP to probe sex scandal at New Brunswick school. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/rcmp-to-probe-sex-scandal-at-new-brunswick-school/article1133098/
The Crime: October 2, 1993
Samantha Dawn Toole, a six-year-old grade-one student with brown, shoulder-length hair and blue eyes, went missing overnight from her family's Bridge Street apartment in Saint John. Her mother, Gloria Toole, had left her with a babysitter the night before and, after spending a night out of heavy drinking, discovered Samantha gone the next morning. According to George, Gloria had informed the police that Samantha was afraid of the water and avoided going near it because of what she might see or find there – a detail made more disturbing by where she was located.
The Saint John Police Department's initial response was not one of urgency as one would expect when a child goes missing. Ms. Toole had to call police four times over a span of roughly two and a half hours before a city-wide alert was issued. Given that Ms. Toole lived in a low-income, social housing neighbourhood, the police were initially dismissive of her concerns. In fact, officers of the Saint John Police Department could be heard on the dispatch radio joking about the socio-economic conditions of the area rather than treating the call with the importance it demanded.
Several hours later, approximately five hours after she had gone missing, it was a neighbour, not the police, who found Samantha's body. She was lying face-up at the water's edge, fists clenched around seaweed, her face bruised, and a wrist fractured. Police and ambulance personnel performed chest compressions on her both at the scene and en route to hospital. She was not pronounced dead at the scene but the condition she was found in, including rigidity and a bluish discoloration to her skin, suggests she may already have been dead by the time she was located. Because a forensic time of death was never conclusively established, it remains an open - and unanswered - question whether a faster police response to her mother's first calls might have made a difference.
The Investigation and the Case Against Pitt
George Pitt was the boyfriend of Samantha's mother and had actively discussed plans to adopt Samantha; to him, she was his daughter. What came as a surprise to him was that, immediately upon her going missing, police focused on him alone as responsible for her disappearance, and to them, there was nothing he could do or say that would prove his innocence. The core of the Crown's case was circumstantial:
Pitt was found doing laundry at roughly 4 a.m. the night Samantha disappeared, a load that included a comforter and bedding.
Forensic examiners found a small bloodstain, roughly one square centimetre, on a bedspread linked to that laundry load, and a separate, larger bloodstain on the comforter whose origin could not be conclusively identified at the time.
Gloria Toole gave police a series of shifting statements over the course of a week: at first saying she knew nothing, then implicating Pitt directly, then later acknowledging her account may not have matched the physical evidence at the scene.
A family friend was found to have lied to investigators about his whereabouts the night before the killing.
Pitt did not testify at his own trial, later saying he believed the Crown's case was too weak to result in a conviction.
Notably, the Crown never offered the jury a motive. No usable DNA, semen, or other biological match tied Pitt directly to the assault; a used condom recovered from the scene was never sent for forensic testing at the time. In addition, officers interpreted Gloria's act of inviting them in to show a photo of Samantha for identification purposes as consent to search the property and immediately began collecting evidence, despite the absence of a search warrant. Items were collected but not removed from the property until a warrant could later be obtained. It is important to note that George Pitt's name was on the mailbox and that he was actively paying rent on Gloria Toole's behalf, and that he, who had prior disputes with officers of the police force, had not given consent to search what were mostly his own belongings.
The 1994 Trial and Conviction
Despite there being only circumstantial evidence against George, and weak circumstantial evidence at best, George was charged with Samantha’s murder. In 1994, after a 14-day trial, where the Crown presented no evidence beyond a weak circumstantial case linking George to the crime, a jury in Saint John convicted him of first-degree murder. Under Canadian law, that conviction carried a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment with parole ineligibility for 25 years.
The Appeals: R. v. Pitt (1996)
Pitt's conviction went to the New Brunswick Court of Appeal on two fronts; both resolved in 1996. On the first appeal, R. v. Pitt (1996a), there was an application to introduce fresh evidence, including an affidavit from a trial witness that altered her earlier testimony and implicated someone else. The witness, however, subsequently recanted key portions of her own affidavit. The Court of Appeal declined to admit it, finding it failed to meet the legal threshold required for new evidence on appeal.
The second appeal, R. v. Pitt (1996b) was decided on August 22, 1996, and was Pitt's substantive appeal against conviction. He argued the trial judge had erred in several of the jury instructions: on how to weigh circumstantial evidence, on witness identification, on jury unanimity, and on inferences of “consciousness of guilt” the Crown had invited jurors to draw from Pitt's post-disappearance conduct. The Court of Appeal rejected each ground and dismissed the appeal, leaving the conviction intact.
Renewed Scrutiny: 2004–Present
The case might have ended there had it not been revived a decade later by investigative reporter Gary Dimmock of the Ottawa Citizen. In a July 2004 feature headlined “Presumed Guilty,” Dimmock reported on a previously secret Correctional Service of Canada document showing that Saint John police had continued quietly investigating the murder for months after Pitt's conviction, and that the police chief at the time reportedly suspected someone other than Pitt (Dimmock, 2004).
That reporting brought the case to the attention of Jerome Kennedy, a lawyer then affiliated with the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC), now Innocence Canada, the organization associated with several well-known Canadian wrongful-conviction exonerations. Innocence Canada began working on George Pitt’s case in 2004. For several years, Jerome and other members of Innocence Canada, actively investigated George’s case, sought fresh evidence, visited George in prison several times, interviewed witnesses, visited the crime scene, and poured through trial transcripts, evidence and other documents. Jerome put together a comprehensive overview of the issues presented in George’s case, however, they were unable to find enough fresh evidence to substantiate an application for conviction review through the Criminal Conviction Review Group (CCRG) of the Department of Justice. Moreover, a group of Law students at the Faculty of Law, University of New Brunswick became involved in investigating George’s case. Under the supervision of then Professor Jula Hughes, the results of the students’ investigation helped in organizing the voluminous materials attached to the case but fell short of the fresh evidence bar. Innocence Ottawa became involved in investigating George Pitt’s case in 2023 and since that time, have continued searching through trial transcripts, and many boxes of evidence. They have attended two parole hearings for George at Dorchester Institution in New Brunswick and are hopeful that he soon sees his release - either to a half-way house, or as an innocent man.
The DNA Retesting: 2005–2006
In June 2005, the New Brunswick government agreed to have evidence from the crime scene, never previously tested, sent for up-to-date DNA analysis. This included four strands of hair recovered from Samantha's body, her nightgown, and body swabs. The results excluded Pitt. The DNA recovered from the tested items belonged only to Samantha herself, not to Pitt, and not to any other identified individual.
Who Is George Pitt? A Childhood Immersed in Institutional Failure
Regardless of George’s journey to prove his innocence, Pitt's own history is a case study in how New Brunswick's child-welfare and youth-justice systems failed a generation of vulnerable boys. Pitt was one of five children born to a father, described as violent and alcoholic. The family home burned down when George was seven. Rather than being placed in foster care, he was sent to an orphanage, where he claims to have been beaten and molested. He stopped attending school at eleven and was charged with truancy; after a second truancy charge, he was sentenced to three months in a youth facility outside Fredericton, the New Brunswick Training School at Kingsclear (Dimmock, 2005).
That single detail connects Pitt's story to one of the darkest institutional-abuse scandals in New Brunswick history. Kingsclear's guard, Karl Toft, pleaded guilty in 1992 to 34 sexual offences against boys in his care and later admitted to as many as 200 assaults spanning the 1960s to the 1980s (CBC News, 2007; The Globe and Mail, 2004). George Pitt was one of Toft's victims, raped at least fifteen times while detained there as a child (Dimmock, 2005). He has said that when he was released, he began drinking to cope, and that alcohol, drug use, overdoses, and suicide attempts followed through his adolescence and adulthood. By the time of his arrest for Samantha Toole's murder, Pitt had already been in and out of custody since the age of eleven and had lived largely on welfare (Dimmock, 2005).
George, as a result, has experienced ongoing struggles with mental health and physical harm during his incarceration for the Toole murder, struggles he attributes to what he describes as the system's refusal to seriously examine his wrongful-conviction claim.
Parole: Two Steps Back
More than three decades after Samantha Toole's death, George Pitt, now in his early sixties, applied for day parole. His first parole hearing was held in the fall of 2023. At that time, the Parole Board of Canada denied parole, but George was encouraged along the trajectory he was on, taking programs, and working toward release. However, his more recent parole hearing in June of this year was somewhat different. The first of the two sittings took place on June 19, and it seems a decision was made at headquarters prior to that hearing that George needed to take a “sex offender maintenance” program. This was a surprise to George and his supporters as he had never been accused nor convicted of a sex offence. George was adamant that he is not a child molester but was molested himself and it would be re-traumatizing for him to be forced to take such a program. He became visibly upset at this notion, and the hearing was adjourned to allow for a community assessment to be done; George was hopeful he would gain day parole and be moved to Hart House, a residential facility run by the John Howard Society.
A second hearing was scheduled for August 17th, and a different Parole Board member was present. Rather than an update, this hearing was run as an actual new hearing - repeating what was done in June. Once again, this new member and George’s parole officer were adamant that he needs to take the sex offender maintenance program to be considered for day parole. This result is puzzling for several reasons. Primarily, this very same parole board had stated that an offender does not need to admit to his/her index offence to be considered for parole. This is even more absurd given that George’s index offence is in fact first-degree murder and not sexual assault. Moreover, George has never been charged with a sex offence, nor has he taken a sex offender program, so this so-called “maintenance” program requirement seems redundant.
Not surprisingly, the Parole Board of Canada denied his application, basing their decision on the following factors:
Refusal of sex-offender programming;
Gaps in his release plan, including the board’s assessment that a proposed half-way house placement did not, on its own, amount to an adequate plan for safe reintegration, a concern the board weighed alongside his health;
Unresolved risk assessments that left the board unsatisfied he could be released without presenting what it called an “undue risk to society.”
George Pitt is 61 years old and is in poor health. He is also bound to a wheelchair. He
remains incarcerated, his conviction on the books, his innocence claim unresolved by any court, and his path to release complicated by the very fact that he continues to assert it. It seems as though the Correctional Service of Canada, along with the Parole Board of Canada is fearful of this frail, older man being released for reasons that remain unfathomable, although their basis may be found in the province’s familiar history of putting the wrong men behind bars for crimes they did not commit.
A Familiar New Brunswick Pattern
Readers of this Blog will recognize the shape of this story, because Saint John's police force has been here before, in a case now formally acknowledged by the force itself. In January 2024, Robert Mailman and Walter Gillespie were officially acquitted of a 1983 murder after serving decades in prison; New Brunswick's Chief Justice apologized to both men for what she called a miscarriage of justice, and federal Justice Minister Arif Virani had ordered a new trial after finding evidence calling into question the fairness of their original prosecution (Global News, 2024); both have since been exonerated. An external review commissioned by Saint John's police chief later attributed the wrongful conviction to “tunnel vision,” whereby investigators fixated on a theory early and then failed to pursue alternatives (Global News, 2025; CBC News, 2025).
While this is not proof of anything in the Pitt case, it is a documented, admitted pattern from the same police force, in the same era. Moreover, it is precisely the kind of context that should inform how seriously untested exhibits, unpursued alternative suspects, and a case built without a stated motive are taken decades later.
References
CBC News. (2007). Kingsclear report likely won't shed much light: Complainant. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/kingsclear-report-likely-won-t-shed-much-light-complainant-1.637813
CBC News. (2025, March 7). Exonerated New Brunswick men victims of police 'tunnel vision,' report says. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/mailman-gillespie-police-review-1.7477800
Dimmock, G. (2004, July 31). Presumed guilty. The Ottawa Citizen.
Dimmock, G. (2005, June 9). Hope at last, and a bid for freedom: Government reopens 12-year-old murder case following Citizen report. The Ottawa Citizen. http://ottawamenscentre.com/news/20050609_George_Pitt.htm
Global News. (2024, January 5). Police chief in N.B. orders review of force's involvement in wrongful murder conviction. https://globalnews.ca/news/10221852/saint-john-police-chief-mailman-gillespie-wronful-conviction-1983
Global News. (2025, March 7). 'Tunnel vision' of police blamed for wrongful murder conviction of 2 N.B. men. https://globalnews.ca/news/11070810/wrongful-murder-conviction-new-brunswick-men/amp
R. v. Pitt (G.W.), 179 N.B.R. (2d) 135 (N.B.C.A. 1996a).
R. v. Pitt (G.W.), 181 N.B.R. (2d) 126 (N.B.C.A. 1996b).
The Globe and Mail. (2004). RCMP to probe sex scandal at New Brunswick school. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/rcmp-to-probe-sex-scandal-at-new-brunswick-school/article1133098/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
