Innocent man convicted by so- called experts. OFFSITE. CBC news report . In a ruling Monday, the province's Appeal Court overturned the conviction. The court, which was asked to review the case by the federal justice minister, could have also set Johnson free or returned him to prison. The case was reopened when it was revealed Johnson, a former high school teacher, had taken out a $1.
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Pathologists later re- examined the original ruling and helped bring about his conviction. But questions always lingered about the high- profile case, which was featured in two controversial documentaries. Johnson repeatedly maintained he was on his way to work when his wife died.
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Those questions and dissenting views from pathologists led to Johnson's release on bail in September 1. Justice Minister Anne Mc. Lellan recommended new forensic opinions be heard by the Nova Scotia Appeal Court.
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HALIFAX (CP) - - Nova Scotia's Court of Appeal has been asked by the justice minister to decide whether new evidence may be used to hear the appeal of a man convicted of beating his wife to death. Clayton Johnson was convicted in 1. Janice. The former Shelburne, N. S., teacher is serving a life sentence. From the Globe and Mail. Clayton Johnson took care to pack a lunch for each of his daughters and complete his daily Bible reading on Feb. At least that was the scenario a jury in Shelburne, N.
S., accepted four years later when it convicted the 5. Janice Johnson with an unknown weapon and leaving her for dead. But the verdict has now come into serious question in light of new expert evidence, combined with the improbability of the purported crime. With Mr. Johnson about to start his sixth year of a life sentence, two U. S. Johnson died from an accidental fall on the basement stairs several minutes after her husband kissed her and drove off to work. In arriving at his conclusion, Dr. Mc. Donell built an identical stairwell and employed a model, in safety straps, to re- enact the incident.
Johnson was the result of an accident. The lawyers maintain that the Clayton Johnson case appears to bear many of the hallmarks of a wrongful conviction, ranging from police tunnel vision to a prosecution based on circumstantial evidence and held in an inflamed community. Campbell said in an interview. Johnson, soft- spoken and understated, wept quietly during an interview last Friday at the Atlantic Institution in Renous, N. B. He said that although he has lost all faith in the justice system, his religious beliefs sustain him. Johnson's legal appeals exhausted, AIDWYC intends to appeal to the federal Justice Department to overturn his conviction.
The request will be made against the backdrop of a dramatic twist in the fifth estate's involvement in the case. In its broadcast tonight, the program intends to renounce a 1. Getting Away with Murder. That episode lionized RCMP Sergeant Brian Oldford, a corporal at the time who refused to accept the official version of Mrs.
Johnson's death as an accident, doggedly fashioning the case that led to her husband's conviction. David Studer, executive producer of the fifth estate, said that after a lengthy reinvestigation of the case, the program is utterly convinced Mr. Johnson is an innocent man. Studer said in an interview. If we get a chance to set the record straight, let's do it. Johnson led an unremarkable life with no criminal record or hint of violence in his past.
He was widely viewed in Shelburne, a town of 3,0. Friends described the couple's 1.
With their daughters, then 8 and 1. Johnsons were tightly entwined in the local Pentecostal community. Johnson, 3. 6, was a homemaker who occasionally babysat for neighbours, the Malloys. She was to look after Brittany Malloy the morning of her death. At 7 a. m., Mr. Johnson phoned Robert Molloy, at his wife's request, to ask him to deliver Brittany by 8 a. Johnson could take the child to a local carnival. A second visitor, Mrs.
Johnson's brother, was to drop off some clothing some time before 8 a. At precisely 7: 4.
Johnson children. Next- door neighbour Clare Thompson watched the girls clamber aboard and dialled Mrs. Johnson's number for a chat. Mrs. Thompson later told police that the two friends talked for almost 1.
They were interrupted briefly when Mrs. Johnson, who was using a phone in the basement, say to her husband, . The two women hung up shortly before 7: 5. It is almost certain that Mr. Johnson left for his 2.
Witnesses confirmed seeing him stop for gas and drive the final 1. Molloy and his daughter arrived at the Johnson home at 7: 5. They found Mrs. Johnson lying at the bottom of the wooden basement stairs in a pool of blood. Molloy rushed to the Thompson home and called an ambulance at 7: 5. Johnson lay struggling for breath, bleeding profusely, one foot resting on the bottom step. Still holding her car keys, she had evidently been preparing to leave the house.
Ambulance attendants tried desperately to stabilize her condition, tossing blood- soaked equipment about the basement as they worked. Johnson arrived for work, a worried secretary instructed him to rush to the hospital. He was visibly distraught as a medical team worked in vain to save his wife.
Later, he spent 1. Asked at his trial what he did, Mr. Johnson, Mary Hartley and Mary Davis, went from the hospital to the Johnson home to clean up most of the blood.
Johnson broke the news to his daughters. The family then moved in with Mrs. Johnson's parents for several weeks. Nova Scotia's chief coroner, Roland Perry, had little problem concluding that Mrs. Johnson had accidentally fallen forward as she went down the stairs.
He deduced that her head had wedged briefly in a 1. Three months after Mrs. Johnson's death, however, the community of Shelburne stopped seeing it that way. Johnson had begun dating a member of the Pentecostal congregation, 2. Tina Weybret, and tongues wagged at high speed. A year later, the couple married.
Oldford, stationed in nearby Yarmouth, heard the gossip and became suspicious. Weybret as a motive for murder. Johnson said in the interview that nobody could possibly carry on an illicit affair undetected in a small town like Shelburne. He said his courtship of Ms.
Weybret was rooted solely in his fear that he could not attend to the needs of his prepubescent daughters on his own. Ms. Weybret confirmed this in an interview. Although they never produced any reliable evidence that there was a relationship between Ms. Johnson before his wife died, they speculated that he killed Mrs.
Johnson to get her out of the way. Oldford spent scouring the community for evidence, he came upon a second possible reason to kill: an insurance policy Mr. Johnson had recently acquired that paid $1. As a motive, it was equally tenuous.
A school trustee later confirmed urging Mr. Johnson to join the insurance plan, just as 4. Testifying at his 1. Mr. Johnson said he did not even realize until after his wife died that her life was covered.
Central to Sgt. Oldford's investigation was a series of interviews with the two women who cleaned up their dead friend's blood after the tragedy. According to the AIDWYC lawyers, Sgt. Oldford showed them gruesome autopsy pictures of Mrs.
Now, they began to recall seeing spots in several other locations.(In the fifth estate program, they stick to their second statements.) However, the two women were alone in remembering the blood. Others at the scene, including ambulance attendants and police officers who searched the basement, had no such recollections. Armed with this new evidence suggesting a struggle, Sgt.
Oldford sought opinions from two outside pathologists, Charles Hutton of St. John's and David King of Hamilton. On the basis of the purported bloodstains, both felt murder was a likely scenario.
Johnson being felled with a two- by- four, trapping her head between stairs and wall, and then receiving several more blows as she lay on the floor. Informed by Sgt. Oldford of their conclusions, the coroner, Dr.
Perry, changed his stance in favour of a murder theory. The fifth estate has confirmed in interviews that Dr. Hutton were not shown two reports by RCMP forensic analysts that warned it would be dangerous to draw conclusions from the purported blood spatters. One of the RCMP analysts used an electronic device that detects minute traces of blood, but did not find any blood traces in portions of the basement identified by Mrs.
Oldford said in an interview yesterday that he cannot recall whether he gave the reports to Dr. I don't see the point.
Oldford became a familiar sight to the Johnson family. He frequently knocked at their door or stopped them in the streets to try to extract more information. Weybret said she was once shown autopsy photos of Mrs. Johnson and warned that she would likely be her husband's next victim. In April, 1. 99. 2, the RCMP charged Mr. Johnson with first- degree murder.
Oldford as telling him. The officer, who was later promoted to the rank of sergeant, said yesterday he thought it unlikely he would say such a thing.
Johnson was vaguely acquainted with 1. However, the trial soon came to focus on the veracity of local gossip and on Mr. Johnson's financial state. After three weeks, Mr. Justice Jamie Saunders of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court delivered a jury charge that laid bare the weaknesses of the Crown's circumstantial case.
On the key issue of bloodstains, he said that if any existed, they might well have been deposited by the family dog shaking its bloodstained fur or by the ambulance attendants flailing about with their equipment. The judge stressed the extreme risk of discovery Mr. Johnson would have faced if he had bludgeoned his wife at the exact time he was supposed to leave for work and two sets of visitors were to arrive. Judge Saunders said he found it personally telling that no wood fragments were found in Mrs.
Johnson's head wounds, despite the fact the murder weapon was supposedly a two- by- four or piece of firewood. Nor were there any bloodstains on the ceiling, he said, as one might expect in a bludgeoning. It was all lost on the jury.