Coffin affair

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The Coffin affair was an event in Canadian history which started in June 1953 in Gaspésie when three men from Pennsylvania were reported missing. Their bodies were found a month later deep in the woods sixty kilometres from the nearest town.

The main suspect in the case was Wilbert Coffin who was found to have many items belonging to the men in his possession. Coffin was sent to trial in July 1954 and even though the evidence against him was mostly circumstantial, he was convicted with one count of murder only as the penal code prohibited multiple convictions of murder in the same trial. On August 5, he was found guilty and sentenced to hanging.

An appeal to the Quebec Court of Queen's Bench was dismissed. Coffin's application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada was turned down but the federal Cabinet submitted a reference question to that Court asking the following question: "If the application made by Wilbert Coffin for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada had been granted on any of the grounds alleged on the said application, what disposition of the appeal would now be made by the court?"[1] [2]

The federal government's decision to take the reference to the Supreme Court of Canada caused tension with the government of the province of Quebec.[3]

The Supreme Court of Canada answered that it would have upheld the conviction of Coffin: Reference re Regina v. Coffin, [1956] S.C.R. 191.

Coffin was hanged at Montreal's Bordeaux Prison on February 10, 1956 at 12:01 AM.

Senator Jacques Hébert, a reporter during the trial, later released two books on the matter: Coffin était innocent in 1958 and J'accuse les assassins de Coffin in 1963.

Hébert's 1963 book caused such controversy that the provincial government established a Commission of Inquiry into the case, headed by judge Roger Brossard with Jules Deschênes as Counsel to the commission. After over 200 witnesses were interviewed, the commission found Coffin did receive a fair trial.

In 1979, filmmaker Jean-Claude Labrecque made a feature film on the matter entitled L'Affaire Coffin. It was released on September 10, 1980. Other documents inspired by the Coffin case include Dale Boyle's song "The Wilbert Coffin Story" and the Alton Price book, To Build A Noose, which reflects Price's intensive research on the case.

In 2006, 50 years to the day after Coffin's hanging, four generations of his family commemorated his death at his gravesite. That week, the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted announced it was studying the Coffin case. The director of client services for the association called the Coffin case "a blot on the criminal justice system", according to the Montreal Gazette.[4]

The coroner at the time, Lionel Rioux, recently told the news media that he believes Coffin was innocent. Rioux accused Maurice Duplessis, premier of Quebec at the time, of making Coffin into a scapegoat for the killings of foreign tourists. Rioux held a coroner's inquest at which Coffin testified and he says that the provincial government destroyed the transcript of Coffin's testimony. At his trial, Coffin did not testify. Speaking in 2006, prominent criminal lawyer Edward Greenspan, blamed Coffin's trial lawyer, Raymond Maher, for keeping Coffin out of the witness box: "It was incompetence with a capital I," Greenspan said of Maher, "It's the worst case of lawyering I've ever seen."[4]

At the time Coffin was hanged, he had an 8-year-old son. The child's mother wanted to marry Coffin before the execution, but Duplessis denied permission and said it would not be "decent."[5]

[edit] External links


[edit] References

  1. ^ Volume 21 - 409. Documents on Canadian External Relations. Retrieved on August 24, 2006.
  2. ^ Reference re Same-Sex Marriage, [2004] 3 S.C.R. 698, 2004 SCC 79, at para. 68
  3. ^ Volume 21 - 410. Documents on Canadian External Relations. Retrieved on August 26, 2006.
  4. ^ a b Scott, Marian. "Was the wrong man hanged?", Montreal Gazette, 2006-02-11. Retrieved on August 24, 2006.
  5. ^ Tyler, Tracey. "Rough justice in the Gaspé", Toronto Star, 2006-02-07. Retrieved on August 26, 2006.
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