It is easy to believe in the presumption of innocence for shoplifting. Nobody’s convictions are tested by a dispute over a stolen jacket. The principle earns its keep somewhere else entirely: in the cases where the allegation is so serious, and our sympathy for the person making it so strong, that every instinct says the trial is a formality.
Those are precisely the cases where the formality is the point.
What the exoneration record teaches
The wrongful conviction movement has spent three decades documenting an uncomfortable pattern on both sides of the border: the gravest allegations produce some of the gravest errors. The Innocence Project in the United States has helped free hundreds of people, a striking share of them convicted of murder and sexual assault: the very categories where public pressure to convict runs hottest. Innocence Canada has built a parallel record north of the border, from Guy Paul Morin to David Milgaard, who spent twenty-three years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit while the actual perpetrator remained free.
The lesson of those files is not that complainants lie; false reporting is not the primary driver of wrongful convictions, and pretending otherwise is its own myth. The drivers are more mundane and more chilling: mistaken identification, flawed forensic science, tunnel-vision investigations, jailhouse informants, and confessions produced by pressure. In other words, system failures. The kind that flourish exactly when everyone in the room already “knows” the answer.
The defence lawyer’s unpopular job
This is the context in which defence work in serious cases has to be understood. When an Edmonton sexual assault lawyer tests identification evidence, or a public defender in Ohio challenges a forensic technique, they are not declaring the complainant unworthy of belief. They are running the only quality-control mechanism a criminal verdict has. Cross-examination, disclosure fights, and expert challenges are the trial system’s audit function, and the exoneration record is a long list of what happens when the audit gets skipped.
The uncomfortable symmetry is this: a system rigorous enough to protect the innocent is the same system that makes convictions of the guilty stick. Verdicts reached through tested evidence survive appeal; verdicts reached through momentum do not. Every conviction later overturned for trial unfairness re-injures the complainant, who is asked to do it all again years later, or watches the case collapse entirely. Rigour at the first trial is not opposed to the interests of victims. It is the best guarantee their case ends with a verdict that lasts.
Believing two things at once
A mature justice culture holds two commitments simultaneously: that people who report sexual violence deserve to be treated with dignity and taken seriously, and that every accused person deserves a real defence and a real trial. Popular discourse keeps insisting we choose one. The exoneration files (and the decades of reform that have made trials fairer for complainants without abolishing the burden of proof) insist we don’t have to.
The presumption of innocence was never designed for the easy cases. It was designed for the nights when the crowd outside the courthouse is certain, the coverage is wall-to-wall, and the accusation is the kind that makes decent people angry. That’s when it earns its keep. That’s also, history keeps showing, when we need it most.
Stacey Purser is a criminal defence and appeals lawyer at Purser Law in Edmonton, Alberta, whose practice includes trial defence and appellate work in serious criminal cases.
