Innocence Canada says Tim Rees, a man convicted of the murder of a 10-year-old Toronto girl more than three decades ago, will have his case reviewed by Ontario’s highest court.
On March 16, 1989, Darla Thurrott was strangled to death in her bed at her Etobicoke home. She was found by her mother in the morning.
The man convicted of murder, Tim Rees, was 25 years old at the time. He had visited Darla’s parents the evening before and had stayed overnight.
Rees was convicted on Sept. 15, 1990, of second-degree murder and sentenced to life.
He was released after serving 26 years in prison in October 2016 and is currently on parole.
The Ontario Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal in 1994, and the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear the case in 1995. He submitted an application for “criminal conviction review” in 2018.
On Wednesday, Arif Virani, minister of justice, along with his predecessor, David Lametti, announced that Rees’ conviction for the 1989 murder of Thurrott would be sent back to the Ontario Court of Appeal to be reviewed.
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According to a release from the department of justice, an extensive review found “there is a reasonable basis to conclude that a miscarriage of justice likely occurred.”
“This determination is a result of the identification of new information that was not before the courts at the time of Mr. Rees’s trial or appeal,” the release read.
According to Innocence Canada, the “compelling feature” of Rees’s application was an undisclosed tape-recorded statement of the landlord who lived in the same home and slept in a room across the hall from Darla.
“The landlord, since deceased, had given a highly incriminating statement to the police hours after the murder but the defence knew nothing of it,” Innocence Canada said. “The landlord was able to testify with impunity, and falsely, that he never had a relationship with Darla and had not been in her bedroom on the night she was murdered.”
The organization also said it believes that if the missing tape-recording had been disclosed in 1989 it would be “doubtful” that Rees would have been charged or convicted in Thurrott’s murder.
Innocence Canada is an organization that advocates for and helps exonerate people who have been convicted of a serious crime they potentially may have not committed.
“The decision of the two Ministers to send the case back to the Court of Appeal is a huge step forward in establishing Tim Rees’ innocence,” said Innocence Canada counsel James Lockyer who filed the ministerial application. “He was a victim of extraordinary non-disclosure.”
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