A lawyer for an Ontario man whose conviction in the killing of a 10-year-old girl decades ago was set aside this week said Friday he hopes to have some clarity on the fate of his client\u2019s case by the end of the year.<\/p>\n
Timothy Rees\u2019s legal team is trying to schedule a date in Superior Court next month to discuss what happens next, including whether another trial will be held, his lawyer James Lockyer said.<\/p>\n
It is up to the Crown to decide whether to prosecute the case a second time and Lockyer said it is not uncommon in these types of cases for the Crown to opt against it.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors also have the discretion to agree to enter an acquittal, which Lockyer said he is hoping for in Rees\u2019s case \u2014 though he doesn\u2019t anticipate it will happen.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey fought this case tooth and nail,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
For Rees, the last several decades \u2014 including more than 20 years behind bars \u2014 were \u201ca nightmare,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cLiving inside a prison, knowing you shouldn\u2019t be there and nobody will listen to you and believe you … you\u2019re always thinking about everything that you\u2019re missing and never going to have,\u201d he said in an interview Friday afternoon.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve lost a huge portion of my life … I\u2019m not going to have my own family per se, my own kids and stuff, you know, I missed all my nieces and nephews growing up,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s all gone and that really hurts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rees said he\u2019s glad the court recognized the injustice against him, though he had hoped it would end in an acquittal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I deserve an apology from somebody, but I guess that ain\u2019t gonna happen,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The Court of Appeal for Ontario on Thursday concluded there was a miscarriage of justice and ordered a new trial for Rees, who was accused of killing Darla Thurrott in 1989.<\/p>\n
He was found guilty of second-degree murder the following year and sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for 15 years.<\/p>\n
His conviction was referred back to the Appeal Court by the federal justice minister in 2023 after new information was identified.<\/p>\n
The new challenge centred on a recording of a conversation between an officer and the landlord of the building, which police had not disclosed. The landlord lived in the same home as Darla and her family.<\/p>\n
The court ruled that withholding the tape diminished the fairness of the trial by denying the defence material to further advance its theory of a third-party suspect.<\/p>\n
Though cases such as Rees\u2019s make headlines, the issue of wrongful convictions isn\u2019t top of mind for most, as people largely don\u2019t realize the extent of the problem or what contributes to it, said Kelly Lauzon, an adjunct professor at Carleton University\u2019s School of Law and Legal Studies.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of people are raised … with the belief that the system works,\u201d and that if someone is convicted it means they did what they\u2019re accused of, she said.<\/p>\n
But the justice system is run by humans and humans are prone to errors, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not that we can\u2019t make mistakes, but it\u2019s (that) we need to acknowledge them and own up to them and make them right, as opposed to taking 20, 30, whatever, years to undo the wrong verdict,\u201d said Lauzon, whose research focuses on wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice.<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t actually know how prevalent wrongful convictions are because they can only be deemed wrongful after they\u2019ve been overturned on appeal, she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
People charged with smaller offences like shoplifting might not be able to challenge their conviction for financial or other reasons, she said. Some might plead guilty to offences because they can\u2019t afford child care or time off work or even transportation to and from the courthouse, not to mention a lawyer, she added.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are … tons of people who have been wrongfully convicted for whatever reason for lesser offences, but we don\u2019t know, because they haven\u2019t been overturned. And nobody\u2019s looking,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Some factors that can lead to wrongful convictions include false confessions, faulty eyewitness identification, flawed forensic science and tunnel vision among investigators, she said.<\/p>\n
Rees said he would like to see changes to the justice system to ensure what happened to him doesn\u2019t happen to anyone else.<\/p>\n
As it is, \u201cit can happen to anybody,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
By Paola Loriggio<\/p>\n
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 28, 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A lawyer for an Ontario man whose conviction in the killing of a 10-year-old girl decades ago was…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":411955,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2147,8142,50,39343],"class_list":{"0":"post-411954","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-canada","9":"tag-justice","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-ontario-quebec"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115630760712741067","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411954\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}