Innocence Canada struggling for funding for wrongfully convicted cases

A Newfoundland man who helps free the wrongfully convicted says his organization is struggling to find funding and could be in jeopardy.

Ronald Dalton was convicted of murdering his wife in 1989 and spent eight years in prison before he was found not guilty in 2000. Now, Dalton is the co-president of Innocence Canada.

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He said with less money, the organization will struggle to review cases efficiently and help those who need it.

"We're not closing down, but it means that with reduced funding, it's going to take us longer," said Dalton on CBC Radio's St. John's Morning Show.

"When cases come in the door, we have to tell people that it could be 10 or 12 years before we can get to your case ... I'm always frustrated with how long it takes us to do cases, in any event, but this is going to slow us down even more."

I'm always frustrated with how long it takes us to do cases, in any event, but this is going to slow us down even more.- Ronald Dalton

He said Innocence Canada is currently reviewing 85 files, and the group believes 16 of those are wrongful convictions.

Dalton said it is always a struggle for non-profit organizations to find funding, but now a donation of $1millionreceived from a retired judge in Ontario has dried up, making things more difficult.

"He just sent us a personal cheque one day for a million bucks and said 'you're doing nice work, we like what you're doing,'" he said.

"That's helped us do more work than we were able to do previously, but that was eight years ago, so that's trickling out, that funding."

Played significant role

Despite the struggle for funding, Dalton said the group has been able to do good work helping to overturn wrongful convictions.

"We've been around for 23 years now, there's been 26 exonerationsin Canada and we've been involved in 21 of those," he said.

"We've played a pretty significant role in correcting some of those mistakes."

Innocence Canada receives significant funding from the Law Foundation of Ontario, and Dalton estimates the group gets $3.5 million a year in pro bono work from lawyers.

"It takes a lot of time to go through transcripts from 10, 15, 20-year-old cases and sometimes there's investigative work [that] has to be done, there's DNA analysis sometimes when we're lucky enough to have that evidence it all costs money," he said.

But, Dalton said there's too much left to be done to give up.

"There's so much work to do and we know that there's people sitting around in prison who don't belong there, so you can't walk away from those cases."