Wrongful Conviction Day 2026

Join us for a discussion supporting exonerees and highlighting injustices faced by the wrongfully convicted

Special Guest: Guy Paul Morin

In 1984, nine-year-old Christine Jessop disappeared from her home in Ontario and was later found stabbed to death, with DNA evidence recovered from her clothing.

Neighbour Guy Paul Morin became a suspect despite a lack of physical evidence directly linking him to the crime, and he was ultimately wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder in 1992 after unreliable hair and fibre evidence, false jailhouse informant testimony, and questionable witness accounts were presented at trial.

Morin maintained his innocence throughout, and in 1995, advanced DNA testing proved that the biological evidence could not have come from him, leading the Ontario Court of Appeal to overturn his conviction and acquit him.

A subsequent public inquiry identified police and prosecutorial tunnel vision, flawed forensic science, unreliable witness testimony, and the misuse of jailhouse informants as major causes of the miscarriage of justice.

In October 2020, 36 years after Christine's murder, Toronto police announced that DNA and genetic genealogy had identified Calvin Hoover, a friend of the Jessop family who had died by suicide in 2015, as the person responsible for the crime.

The identification finally confirmed Morin's innocence and provided some measure of closure for Christine's family, although the case demonstrated the lasting harm that wrongful convictions can cause to both victims' families and innocent people.