Because sending an innocent man to prison should be the ultimate affront to any criminal justice system, the issue of compensation to the victim for wrongful conviction must be addressed as an important area of legal reform. Given the fallibility of all human systems of criminal justice, a system of compensation, other than "ex gratia," should insure that victims of wrongful conviction are uniformly compensated. An additional area of legal reform should include a change from an adversarial system of justice to an inquisitorial one, in which judges are held more accountable for an investigation into the issues and evidence of a given case.
The four styles of social control used by Canadian courts are compensation, conciliation, punishment, and treatment . . . [but] no single one of these purposes is common to all Canadian courts (Boyd, 1994, p. 145). In the case of wrongful conviction to be discussed, as is the case in criminal courts in general, the court has two separate tasks: (1) it must establish the guilt of the accused, and (2) it must prescribe an appropriate punishment or treatment. The two missing components--conciliation and compensation--are not present in the following case of David Milgaard, and the general welfare of the Canadian judicial system is worse off as a result.
The fallibility of the courts is put under a magnifying glass in the case of David Milgaard, wrongly accused and convicted of the murder of Gail Miller, on the morning of January 31, 1969. Milgaard went to jail at the age of 16, and emerged from prison in April, 1992, 23 years later. According to Boyd (1994), "the Milgaard case raises questions about the justice system and the manner in which it responds to its inevitable responsibility" (p. 149). A justice system's ability to adequately get at the truth may be dependant upon a judge's ability to ask questions relevant to the accurate and thorough collection of information. David Milgaard w...