On June 26, 1993, William Mullins-Johnson was babysitting his brother’s three children. At the time, he was 22 years old and living with his brother’s family at their home in Toronto, Canada. He frequently babysat the children, and the children really loved him. That day, however, one of the children, a four-year-old girl, had a fever. He checked on her half an hour after she went to bed and found her sleeping.
William was awoken the next morning by the crying and screaming of the mother of the children. She had gone to check on the girl who had a fever and found her dead with vomit on her bed. Her body was subsequently taken to the nearby general hospital, where a pathologist performed a post-mortem examination.
Prior to the dissection of the body, the pathologist consulted a much-celebrated senior colleague at a famous children’s hospital. The senior pathologist opined that the child could have been sexually abused.
The pathologist then consulted another doctor who specialised in cases of child abuse. To the specialist, this was among the worst instances of child sexual abuse that she had encountered. The pathologist then concluded that the cause of death was asphyxiation due to external compression of her airways, meaning that she had been suffocated, and that the child had been sexually abused repeatedly in the past.
William was arrested for first-degree murder and aggravated sexual assault of his niece on June 27, 1993, less than 12 hours after the child’s body had been found. William, who is Indigenous and had a prior conviction for robbery, would later speculate that had he been White, the police investigation would have been longer.
William’s trial began on September 6, 1994, and lasted a little over two weeks. The jury heard testimony from several expert witnesses who told the court that the child had been sexually abused and suffocated to death, as indicated by dilation and damage observed in her genital area, as well as bruising to her head, neck, and chest.
In addition, one expert gave evidence to support the prosecution’s theory that William had killed his niece while sexually assaulting her. This, in law, is a necessary element for a first-degree murder conviction. The expert further testified that he had found microscopic evidence of recent sexual abuse around the time of the child’s death.
On September 21, 1994, after deliberating for six hours, the jury found William guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 25 years. While incarcerated, William received death threats from other inmates, whom he feared might slash his throat. At one point, he spent four months in solitary confinement for his protection.
William appealed his conviction to the Ontario Court of Appeal. On December 19, 1996, a two-to-one majority of the court dismissed his appeal. The majority stated that the court of appeal’s role was limited when reviewing evidence on which a jury reached its verdict; it should give appropriate deference to the jurors, who actually saw and heard the witnesses. The majority recognised that the evidence against William was not overwhelming, but declined to interfere with the jury’s guilty verdict, finding that this verdict was not unreasonable.
In addition, the majority found that the fairness of William’s trial had not been compromised when the judge failed to instruct the jury not to infer guilt from his psychiatric history.
The third judge, in dissent, said he would have given William a new trial. The judge identified a number of deficiencies in William’s trial, including inadequate jury instructions pertaining to his defence. Notably, the judge observed that only one expert witness testified as to evidence of a recent sexual assault. He presciently stated that, in his view, the evidence of whether William or anybody had sexually assaulted the deceased, or had attempted to do so, was weak.
Because one of the Ontario Court of Appeal judges dissented, William had an automatic right of appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada; the Supreme Court was required to hear his appeal if he brought one. William, therefore, appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court, but the appeal was dismissed in a mere one-paragraph judgment on May 26, 1998, on the ground that the judges were all of the view that this appeal be dismissed for the reasons of the majority of the Court of Appeal.
Having exhausted his appeal options, William sought help from an organisation known as the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted. In February 2003, the defence counsel requested that the Crown release the microscopic slides and related materials obtained from the child’s autopsy to an independent forensic pathologist who would review William’s case.
Over the following year and a half, the pathologist who performed the autopsy did not provide these materials and failed to respond to repeated requests for them. He lied to the prosecution, police, and other doctors as to where they had gone. Finally, the slides were retrieved from the pathologist’s office with the assistance of the Chief Coroner for Ontario.
The Chief Coroner asked a senior pathologist to review the slides, during which review the senior pathologist realised that the initial findings had been gravely misinterpreted. The senior pathologist discovered that the tissue preserved from the child’s post-mortem examination in the slides was normal and did not suggest that any kind of assault had occurred.
The apparent tissue damage and dilation observed during the initial post-mortem examination in the child’s genital region, and bruising to her upper body, were no more than the result of normal processes following death or were caused by procedures connected to the post-mortem investigation.
In other words, the pathologist who carried out the initial post-mortem examination had mistaken body changes that occur naturally after death, as well as the changes caused by the post-mortem examination itself, for indicia of an especially horrific violent crime.