Clarence Woodhouse outside the Winnipeg courthouse following his acquittal and exoneration. Photo: Cierra Bettens/APTN.
A First Nations man from Manitoba has been granted a new trial in a 50-year-old case that could signal his exoneration.
Clarence Woodhouse of Pinaymootang and his Innocence Canada lawyers are scheduled to appear in a Winnipeg courtroom Thursday before the province’s Chief Justice Glenn Joyal.
Woodhouse is hoping Joyal acquits him of the 1973 downtown murder of a restaurant worker, as the judge did with two of his co-accused Brian Anderson and Allan (A.J.) Woodhouse in 2023.
The news comes on International Wrongful Conviction Day and the 10-year anniversary of Innocence Canada.
All three men said they were wrongfully convicted and appealed to federal justice ministers to review their cases as possible miscarriages of justice.
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Anderson and Allan Woodhouse were acquitted and exonerated shortly after then justice minister David Lametti ordered a new trial for them.
Clarence Woodhouse submitted his request to Federal Justice Minister Arif Virani last September, says Innocence Canada in a news release.
Innocence Canada says it also filed a posthumous application on behalf of Clarence’s brother, Russell Woodhouse, the fourth co-accused. Russell was found guilty of manslaughter and died in 2011.
Clarence was 21 when he was convicted.
“The prosecution’s case at his trial in 1974 depended on a confession that he was supposed to have made in fluent English despite Saulteaux being the language he spoke,” said Innocence Canada in a news release Wednesday.
“Mr Woodhouse testified that he was assaulted by members of the Winnipeg Police into signing a false confession, but the trial judge and an all-white jury disbelieved him. Innocence Canada adopted his case last year and brought it before the Justice Minister urging him to quash his conviction.”
Virani quashed Clarence’s murder conviction on June 28, Innocence Canada said in a release
“(The Winnipeg court appearance) will be the next step on what we hope is Clarence Woodhouse’s road to vindication.”
Lawyer Jerome Kennedy, a director of Innocence Canada, is leading Clarence’s case.
“Fifty-one years has been an interminable wait for Clarence Woodhouse, but he never gave up,” Kennedy said in the release. “Tomorrow will be an extraordinary day for him, to be back in the very same court where he was wrongly convicted.”
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Anderson and Allan Woodhouse are now suing all three levels of government for compensation. They were in their late teens and had moved two hours south to Winnipeg from Pinayomtang (formerly Fairford) to find work.
They allege the Crown prosecutor and Winnipeg police officers colluded to obtain their convictions, in a statement of claim filed in Manitoba Court of King’s Bench in April.
They seek damages for pain and suffering from the federal and provincial attorneys general, City of Winnipeg and province of Manitoba.
Manitoba Prosecution Service executive director Michele Jules blamed systemic racism for the convictions of Anderson and Allan Woodhouse during their final court appearance last July.
She confirmed the men, now in their late 60s, were wrongfully convicted and their confessions were “entirely manufactured by police detectives.”
