How hard is it to right a wrongful conviction in Canada?

In today’s Big Story Podcast, you would expect that advances in forensics and genetic technology would lead to fewer and fewer wrongful convictions. The truth is that we have no idea how many people are in prison for crimes they didn’t commit — we only know that we keep finding them.

Kelly Lauzon is PhD student in the department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University and cohost of the podcast Real Life Wrongs. She explained even if people know they’ve been wrongfully convicted, the appeal process is so arduous that often only those involved in  serious cases go through it.

“The people who are convicted of summary offences are not likely going to invest the time, the money, the effort to have things overturned because it was a summary conviction. But those are wrongful convictions.”

How do wrongful convictions happen in the age of DNA evidence? How hard are they to overturn? And what about all the wrongful convictions that aren’t murders? Do we ever try to grapple with those?

You can subscribe to The Big Story podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google and Spotify.

You can also find it at thebigstorypodcast.ca.