What Is The Christine Jessop Case

“On July 30, 1992, an innocent person was convicted of a heinous crime”. Guy Paul Morin, an ordinary man, was arrested, imprisoned and convicted of first degree murder. The victim was Christine Jessop, a nine-year-old girl from Ontario, Canada. She was found murdered in a field about fifty kilometres from where she lived. Due to the investigation team’s carelessness and tunnel vision, the systematic failure of the justice system, and the poor handling of evidence by the crown there was not only one, but two victims in this case.

Guy Paul Morin, the neighbour of Christine, was a victim of being unjustifiably focused on by the investigating team. In this case police were desperate to solve this horrible, high-profile crime in order to keep the

Justice Fred Kaufman found in his 1997 report on the commission of inquiry into that wrongful conviction. In the Jessop’s original statement they had arrived home at 4:10 p.m. on October. 3, 1984, and Christine was not home. The focus of the police shifted to Morin, who was the Jessop’s neighbour and lived with his parents. The police discovered that Morin left work at 3:32 p.m. that day and could not have made it home before 4:14 p.m. In addition, Morin and his parents stated that he had stopped to pick up groceries on the way home from work, making his arrival time even later. In short, the Jessops were home before he

According to Kaufman, "the whole interview process was inappropriately calculated to persuade Ken and Janet Jessop that their earlier times were wrong and to modify those times”. The interview was 150 minutes long and no formal statement was received from them, nor did the officers have any detailed notes to provide. “(One of the investigating officers) admitted that they told the Jessops that their times were wrong," the judge said. The end result was the changing of times by the Jessops. The officers recorded their new arrival time as 4:35 p.m. That opened a window of opportunity for Morin to abduct Christine and commit the crimes. In 1997, the Jessops told Kaufman that they still strongly believe their original time of 4:10 for the inquiry.

The inquiry, written by Fred Kaufman, outlines many unreasonable measures taken by the police and the crown throughout Morin’s trial. A major issue in the case evolved from using jailhouse informants in an attempt to retrieve an in-custody statement from Morin. On April 22, 1985, Morin was taken to Whitby Jail. There he encountered two inmates, Mr. X and Robert May. Both inmates claimed to have overheard a confession made by Morin during their time in jail. They testified for the crown at both trials with this