In an entirely unexpected exception to its locked-door approach to the outside world, Correctional Services Canada agreed in the late 1980s to let a newspaper reporter wander around a protective custody cellblock at Kingston Penitentiary. Not just any protective custody range, but a virtual murderer’s row known as H Block, home to almost two dozen of the country’s worst villains—killers such as Clifford…
Kirk Makin
Kirk Makin covered The Globe and Mail’s justice beat for 30 years. Having retired in 2013, he teaches and does freelance legal writing.
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Kirk Makin
Most reporters would undoubtedly have ignored a 1999 Supreme Court of Canada case involving the right to fish for eels had Donald Marshall not been the defendant. Marshall—Canada’s first celebrated victim of a wrongful murder conviction—was appealing his conviction for catching a doryload of eels out of season using a 250-year-old treaty between the Mi’kmaq band and the…