01/17/2025
A century behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit – Untangling the wrongful-conviction legacy of famed Crown attorney George Dangerfield
https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/2025/01/16/a-century-behind-bars-for-crimes-they-didnt-commit
By Dan Lett and Katrina Clarke
For a man who lived most of his adult life in the spotlight, there was something oddly low-key about George Dangerfield’s death.
A highly accomplished Crown prosecutor, Dangerfield had a career that was the stuff of legends. From the early 1970s until 2000, he prosecuted dozens of Manitoba’s most notorious criminals. Serial killers, predatory rapists and bent cops all faced justice at the point of Dangerfield’s accusing finger.
He fought many of his cases all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, making new law in victory and defeat before the highest court in the land.
But in September 2023, Dangerfield died amidst a deafening silence. There was no memorial service, no obituary,
no public acknowledgment of the death of one of Manitoba’s most high profile prosecutors. So quiet was his passing that even most of those who claimed to know Dangerfield had died could not pin down the date. But this does not mean Dangerfield has gone gently into that good night.
For the foreseeable future, Dangerfield’s record will be subject to intense scrutiny and even more intense debate within the criminal justice system.
At present, the late prosecutor is linked to five wrongful convictions involving eight men who collectively spent more than 100 years in prison for crimes they did not commit.
Many of the names of his victims — Thomas Sophonow, James Driskell, Kyle Unger and Frank Ostrowski — have been burned into the memories of members of this province’s legal profession.
In their wakes, the cases have left a trail of various forms of misconduct — undisclosed evidence, a reliance on junk science and secret deals with Crown witnesses. They have also spawned two commissions of inquiry and required payments of millions of dollars in compensation for victims.
The most recent Dangerfield case to be overturned involved four Indigenous men from the Pinaymootang First Nation — Brian Anderson, Clarence Woodhouse, Russell Woodhouse and Allan Woodhouse — who were convicted of the 1973 murder of 40-year-old Winnipeg restaurant worker Ting Fong Chan.
After years of media coverage, Innocence Canada took on the case and helped prove Winnipeg police investigators had manufactured confessions from the four men.
In an extraordinary gesture, King’s Bench Chief Justice Glenn Joyal convened special court hearings to not only overturn the convictions of Anderson, Allan Woodhouse and Clarence Woodhouse, but to declare them innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted. Crown prosecutor Michele Jules also apologized to the men. Russell
Woodhouse’s conviction is still being fought posthumously. He died in 2011.
A highly accomplished Crown attorney, George Dangerfield prosecuted dozens of Manitoba’s most notorious criminals. But he
