Court of Appeal quashes first-degree murder conviction of Ostrowski

More than 30 years after the conviction of a man in Winnipeg for murder, he says he did not commit a crime, undisclosed police notes and a secret agreement involving a key witness led the Manitoba Supreme Court to dismiss this case. decision.

The Court of Appeal has officially quashed the conviction of first degree murder Frank Ostrowski, 69, has been fighting since a jury found him guilty in 1987 of orchestrating the drug-related murder of Robert Nieman, 22 years old.

In an expected 44-page decision on Tuesday afternoon, the panel of judges decided to suspend the proceedings after the Ostrowski murder conviction was overturned, after the Crown attorneys acknowledged that There had been miscarriage of justice.

"I am justified and I am a free man now, and no one can look at me and say," There is a murderer, "said Ostrowski, discovering the court's decision by phone call from Free Press.

"It makes me happy, but I would have liked an acquittal … a total acquittal would remove any stigma, you see."

Ostrowski was not acquitted because there is still a lot of evidence against him, finally decided the court of appeal.

Despite new evidence uncovered only after Ostrowski retained the services of wrongfully convicted lawyers, the jury decided that it would still be reasonable for a jury to decides to convict Ostrowski if the case is to be retried.

A new trial will not take place, all parties agreed, because of the decades since the 1986 shooting.

The "judicial justice" for Ostrowski, Judge Holly Beard wrote in the decision, was twofold: a lawsuit in court with a police informant, Matthew Lovelace, who had testified against Ostrowski at his trial had never been revealed to the defense lawyer. The notes and report of an officer from the Winnipeg Police Service, Sgt. N. Jacobson, who had a phone conversation with the informant a few hours before the murder.

"There were inconsistencies between Mr. Lovelace's testimony about the content of the message he left with Sergeant Jacobson, the note that Sergeant Jacobson left for the other officers, and the Jacobson report that could have been used by the defense to discredit Mr. Lovelace's testimony, if they had been disclosed to the defense before the trial for murder, "wrote Beard in the decision, also signed by judges William Burnett and Jennifer Pfuetzner.

Ostrowski's lawyer, James Lockyer, founding director of the Association for the Defense of Falsely Sentenced Persons, had been working on the appeal since 2001, along with the lawyer for Winnipeg defense, Alan Libman. On Tuesday, he said that he was happy for Ostrowski but disappointed that no one was held responsible for how the case had been handled since 1986. Since then, the rules relating to the disclosure of evidence and transactions between witnesses and witnesses have been tightened.

"After 32 years, it's good that Frank's conviction is finally overturned and that he's no longer carrying it on his shoulders.But it's unfortunate, as it happens so often in these cases, that he there is no responsibility, "Lockyer said. "Thirty-two years, a miscarriage of justice, we raise our shoulders somewhat and continue.

"It's not enough for me, but I'm afraid it's what happened here, there is no responsibility," he said.

"An acquittal is a more resounding exoneration: Undeniably, a judicial stay of proceedings seems a rather arid way to put an end to a 32 year miscarriage of justice."

Prior to Ostrowski's trial in 1987, defense lawyers who represented him suspected an agreement between prosecutors and Lovelace, who had subsequently lost all of his drug charges after he had testified on the alleged role of Ostrowski in the death of Nieman.

Crown prosecutors in charge of the murder trial maintained that he had not agreed, and the jury was never informed of this.

Provincial prosecutors will later testify that they are not aware of the agreement between Lovelace's defense lawyer and the federal prosecutors who were dealing with the drug charges against him. On appeal, Ostrowski's lawyers claimed that they needed to know.

Several senior police officers, Crown attorneys and court staff who worked on the case in the late 1980s – including former Crown Attorney, George Dangerfield, l '. Former Crown Attorney Sidney Lerner (now a Provincial Court Judge) and former Lovelace Attorney Hymie Weinstein were called to testify before the Court of Appeal last year.

Weinstein stated that he wished the contract to be kept secret with his client until the end of Ostrowski's trial so that his testimony would not be tampered with.

Evidence of the agreement was essential to obtain the overturn of Ostrowski's conviction, and it took years to obtain evidence, Lockyer said. There was no mention of this in the Manitoba Department of Justice file on the murder. So Lockyer turned to the federal government.

"I remember asking the federal Crown to disclose the file to me, and they called me back and said no, they could not do it," he said. "I said, if you were me, would you like to see what was in this file?" And there was a long pause, then he said, "Yes, I would." "And so I pursued him."

In 2014, the then Minister, Peter MacKay, decided that it was reasonably probable that a miscarriage of justice had occurred and referred the case to the Court of Appeal of Manitoba. It took another three years for the court to hear the case – some of which is still sealed and protected by a publication ban – and six months for its decision to be rendered.

Ostrowski officially joins the ranks of other highly publicized cases involving a wrongful conviction in Manitoba, pursued by Dangerfield: Kyle Unger, James Driskell and Thomas Sophonow.

He has been on bail since 2009, as a result of conditions ordered by the court that resulted in the cancellation of his conviction.

"I am happy to be a free man now, and I am dissatisfied with the justice system to take so much time to come to this kind of decision.There should be a process put in place so that it will never take as much long time for anyone else, "Ostrowski said.

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Katie May
Judicial journalist

Katie May reporting on the courts, crime and justice for Free Press.

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