So, there was no wrongdoing in the David Milgaard case, although the Commission of Inquiry does find the justice system failed him.

No wrongdoing. No one did anything wrong, it was just a series of incredibly unfortunate events, mistakes if you will. One after another, after another after another…. But no one ever, as far as can be determined to a judge’s satisfaction, ever did anything that purposely amounted to screwing David Milgaard over.

Putting aside the fact it cost almost 12 million dollars and took almost two years to reach that conclusion, I gotta tell you, people are going to have trouble believing this.

To be fair, over 30 years after the rape and murder of Gail Miller, we knew it was going to be monstrously difficult to find answers. And to be fair, Mr. Justice Edward MacCallum has to operate on fact, he can’t make leaps of logic.

Yet, the suspicion remains that that’s exactly what happened to put an innocent man in jail for 23 years. Police may have truly believed they had the right man, but did they sometimes do what they could to make inconvenient facts line up more suitably? The closest MacCallum comes to suggesting that is when he says he won’t call it coercion, but the Calgary police officer who conducted polygraph tests on two key witnesses, got them to say things that weren’t true.

By introducing the word 'coercion' into his report, I believe MacCallum is telling us to make our own decision on that.

But you know, after all of the months of testimony, some of the harshest criticism in the report is reserved for Joyce Milgaard and her tactics to free her son.  Kind of tells you something about the sensibilities of our justice system, doesn’t it?