The Wrong Man in the Right Place

vancouver — He’s not the kind of person you’d think the police would want to spend time with, much less invite to a private get-together. After all, Thomas Sophonow is one of the disturbing number of wrongly convicted people in Canada — a victim of police and prosecutorial misconduct.

In 1982, Winnipeg police arrested Sophonow, then twenty-nine, for strangling a sixteen-year-old doughnut-shop waitress named Barbara Stoppel. In the course of their investigation, they used dubious eyewitnesses and even more dubious jailhouse informants, ignoring other leads in a classic case of tunnel vision. Sophonow was tried three times, resulting in one hung jury and two convictions that were overturned on appeal. He was incarcerated during this time, emerging after his second appeal, an outright acquittal in 1985, a broken man, shunned by many as a murderer who got off on a technicality. For years, Sophonow vainly proclaimed his innocence, but it was only in 2000 — fifteen years later — that police finally cleared him and announced that they had a new suspect.

With that kind of history, it was surprising to see Sophonow listed as a speaker at the Vancouver Police Homicide Investigators Conference last fall, alongside people such as the lead investigator on the Laci Peterson murder case and the officer who’d tracked Washington’s infamous Beltway snipers. But to their credit, police are starting to concede that although, as the old Mountie slogan put it, they always get their man, their man is sometimes the wrong one.

Detective Rob Faoro, an eight-year veteran of the Vancouver Police Department’s homicide squad and one of the conference organizers, said they wanted Sophonow to shake up the crowd. “He’s real. He’s not somebody I read about in the paper,” Faoro said. “If we can see the guy in person, if we can live it and feel it, maybe we can think twice the next time.”

And there will be a next time, because good police officers know that even with recent advances in dna technology, mistakes get made. There are no hard numbers of the wrongly convicted, but a handful of famous cases — Donald Marshall, David Milgaard, Guy Paul Morin, and Steven Truscott among them — have led to various inquiries and reviews, which have recommended measures such as taping interviews of suspects and banning the use of jailhouse informants. Implementation has been spotty at best.

Outside the conference room in Vancouver, a fidgety Sophonow was rethinking his decision to appear. He doesn’t particularly like police officers, much less 250 of them. “I’d blow up in fits of rage,” he said of the aftermath of his arrest and trials. “Over nothing. I’d feel it coming on. Up my back and up the back of my hair — and I’d just blow up. It would last for a few seconds and then I’d be normal again.”

Once inside, Sophonow spoke faintly and haltingly to the assembled homicide hunters. “You ever get that really nauseous feeling in the pit of your stomach?” he asked them. He told them he’d felt that way once when looking at a poster of a smiling police officer holding the hand of an adoring little girl. “I made a promise to myself that my kids would never believe the propaganda that was put out.”

This was not going to be a “let bygones be bygones” speech. The officers and prosecutors squirmed as Sophonow recounted how few of his co-workers would talk to him at the machine shop where he laboured for fourteen years. On one occasion, someone literally pinned the label “murderer” on his work overalls. “I would stand by the machine 100 times a day and curse the cops who did this to me,” he said. “May each and every one of them burn in hell for all eternity.” In the depths of his despair, he told the crowd, he’d plotted to blow up a police station, though he never followed through.

Sophonow described how his own house in New Westminster was firebombed in 1995; no one was ever arrested or charged. He held back sobs, breathed heavily, and brought a finger nervously to his mouth.

“Dead silence, right?” he observed wryly. “After years of therapy, I can sleep now,” he concluded.