Wrongfully convicted man's trial delayed 2 weeks

A man wrongfully convicted of murder will have to wait even longer for his civil trial to start after the case was adjourned for two weeks on Tuesday morning.

Erin Michael Walsh's five-week trial was supposed to begin on Tuesday morning in Saint John, but a lawyer representing Walsh had a death in the family. The trial has been rescheduled to start on Oct. 26.

Walsh is suing for compensation after being wrongfully convicted of murder in 1975.

Walsh's 1975 conviction was overturned by the New Brunswick Court of Appeal in 2008. He is suing the province, the Saint John city police and William McCarroll, a sitting judge who was the Crown prosecutor at the time, for compensation.

Walsh, who is dying of colon cancer, argues he was deprived of a fair trial because key pieces of evidence were not disclosed that would have exonerated him at his original trial.

Meanwhile, the provincial government has argued that while Walsh didn't get a fair trial, it had reasonable grounds to accuse him.

The civil trial is expected to last five weeks.

Walsh was convicted of murdering Melvin (Chi Chi) Peters in August 1975.

At the time Walsh, who has a long criminal record, was travelling from Toronto.

He arrived in Saint John and met up with a group that included Peters for drinks at a beach in the city's south end.

When leaving the area, a fight broke out in a car, a shotgun went off and Peters was killed.

1975 jury convicted him in 1 hour

At Walsh's trial in 1975, prosecutors presented the case as open and shut, and the jury took only one hour to convict him of second-degree murder and hand him a life sentence.

After several of Walsh's earlier appeals were denied, federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson ordered the conviction be reviewed in light of new evidence in February 2008.

The evidence, obtained by Walsh as part of a 2005 access to information request, included a report of jailhouse conversations that suggested someone else shot Peters.

Documents filed with the appeal court indicated that McCarroll, the former Crown prosecutor, later told John Briggs, the federal investigator hired to review the Walsh case, that he did disclose the cell block conversations.

McCarroll told Briggs that the defence must have opted not to use the reports because: "This is a bunch of drunks that are jabbering."

The federal investigator said if Walsh's trial lawyers had full disclosure as McCarroll claims, those facts would have been reflected in examinations at the preliminary hearing or at trial.

"A review of those transcripts suggests that both counsel were simply lacking in the knowledge that they would have had if, in fact, they had received complete disclosure," the Briggs report said.

When the Court of Appeal quashed Walsh's conviction, it said the conversations in the cell blocks and police statements of other Crown witnesses "would most assuredly have gone a long way in convincing a jury about the unreliability of the main Crown witnesses…. The lack of disclosure of their statements to the police, by itself, would be sufficient to raise a trial fairness issue resulting in a miscarriage of justice."