by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Réjean Pépin, 52, knows the shock of being declared guilty of a crime he had nothing to do with. “It’s like the sky falling down on your head,” says the Anjou municipal blue-collar worker, who was found guilty of four counts of robbery 20 years ago. “I walked into the court for my verdict thinking it was a formality. I had my car keys in my hand. I couldn’t conceive of the possibility that I’d be found guilty.”

But the prosecutor convinced Judge Denis Dionne that Pépin had time to sneak away from his two jobs to commit the crimes. Pépin, who suspects the judge’s mind was compromised by an advanced diabetic medical condition, ended up spending seven months inside of three provincial prisons, completing almost an entire sentence for somebody else’s misdeed.

“I was sent to the hole and beaten by other inmates,” Pépin says. “The guards pressured me to admit to the crime, saying it’d help me get out earlier. I was sickened by being there, and was right to be sickened.”

Veteran public relationist Carlo Tarini, who is working with Pépin and others to reform the compensation system, says that Quebec’s innocent jailbirds have a tougher road than those in the rest of Canada. Pépin spent 16 years trying to right the wrong, which included a failed civil lawsuit for $1-million, leading him into bankruptcy. Eventually the Quebec ombudsman suggested the province own up. He was compensated with $188,000—half from the province, half from the federal government—and asked not to talk about his ordeal.

Pépin remains the only person ever to have been compensated by a long-standing special provincial program to deal with the wrongfully convicted. “Even today I feel aggression against the system because of the way I was dealt with,” he says. “I lost a wife, a house, I lost it all. I feel my rights were abused and I feel for all other cases of judicial error.”

Last Tuesday, Pépin and Tarini protested at provincial Justice Minister Yvon Marcoux’s golf tournament. They want a full public inquiry into why a half-dozen men, including Michel Dumont and Simon Marshall—both of whom spent five years in prison for rapes they did not commit—were wrongfully convicted.

“These cases are pretty similar in that there’s a botched police investigation, the prosecutor doesn’t ask the right questions, the police don’t get the right details and they overlooked DNA tests and fingerprint evidence,” says Tarini. “We want to know how such investigations are allowed to go haywire. Why prosecuting attorneys are there to convict people rather than making sure justice is served. How they take it upon themselves to demolish these people in order to increase their batting averages.”

He also wants better treatment for the wrongly incarcerated, including compensation “determined through an impartial process,” he says. “Now they have to duke it out through civil litigation. It’s a sham, a second injustice. They get out of jail with a bus ticket and have to work 15 hours a day to pay their attorney just to get some measure of justice.”