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An unfortunate fact about the legal system is that it's much easier for lawyers to sway a jury based on emotions than facts. simply labeling someone as a child abuser and then recounting a sordid tale is enough to get most people to switch off their rational faculties completely. Another unfortunate fact is many defense attorneys start work from the premise that the client is both guilty and an idiot, accepting the facts as alleged and trying to develop a counter-narrative that legally excuses or at least mitigates them. Protestations about the validity of the factual allegations are evaluated as legal arguments, with the implicit assumption that the police work will stand up to examination and that challenging it will alienate the jury even more than the initial allegations. To my mind this is a by-product of legal education, where lawyers are tasked with identifying precedential or logical flaws in an opponent's argument rather than considering the entire set of circumstances. Answering 'First, I would examine all the evidence to make sure it was correct that the police did not make mistakes...' will not earn you any points on a typical law school exam; it's regarded as similar to disputing the givens on a logic or philosophy problem. I don't know about Canadian law specifically, but in US law appeals revolve solely around legal issues and the facts adduced at trial are assumed to be correct by default; you can't appeal on the basis that the facts were wrong or that the evidence was lacking, but must go on the basis that the wrong legal conclusion was drawn from the evidence in question or that your attorney failed to represent you properly (which requires you to explain why you didn't fire them at an earlier stage). If I ever found myself wrongly accused I would never, ever go for a jury trial but ask for a bench trial instead, where the judge is the sole decider. Unlike a jury, a judge has to write out the reasoning for the decision. (It's sad that even here, the judge failed to notice the discrepancy in the evidence.) And if a defense attorney proposed to go on some other basis than the correctness of the facts I would seek to replace them immediately, even if this meant a longer period of pretrial detention. Most people go along with bad defense strategies because the carceral process is so demoralizing that they want to escape it as quickly as possible, even at the price of pleading guilty or letting the defense counsel field the wrong sort of argument. Even when someone is certain of their innocence like this defendant, starting a fight with one's own lawyer (who might be their only friend in the world if the accusation is lurid or grave enough) is often too scary for a defendant to imagine. I'm curious (but not optimistic) as to whether anyone in the police, prosecution, or judiciary will face any consequences for their carelessness in this case beyond slower promotion. It's also unclear how the state intends to make the unfortunate defendant whole beyond declaring him the the victim of a procedural error. Compensation in such cases is usually calculated around loss of expected earnings; since it's hard to put a price on the loss of liberty, dignity, safety, or sanity those deficits are usually accorded some fixed nominal value, which tends to be on the low side. For example, the Federal government in the US pays $50,000 per year of imprisonment and $100,000 per year on death row; states have their own formulas and I assume things are approximately similar in Canada. Personally, I don't think $75,000 is adequate compensation for 1.5 years in prison on a child sex crime charge, which notoriously puts a convict at a much higher risk of violence from other prisoners than crimes involving property or ordinary violence. |