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Truscott judge vs. Truscott author

The Globe and Mail has acquired 40-year-old letters written by Justice Ronald Ferguson of the Supreme Court of Ontario, the judge who originally sentenced Steven Truscott to death in the 1959 trial. In the letters, sent to then-justice minister Pierre Trudeau and Ontario Attorney-General A.A. Wishart, Ferguson lobbies to have author Isabel LeBourdais prosecuted for “public mischief” for her book The Trial of Steven Truscott.

Published in 1966, Ms. LeBourdais’s exposé of the Truscott trial precipitated an unprecedented storm of media and public protest against the conviction and death sentence meted out to Mr. Truscott, who was 14 at the time.

In one of his fevered letters to Mr. Wishart, Judge Ferguson remarked that the Truscott controversy “has disturbed the emotions of everyone in Canada and even beyond Canada throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. She has caused more fuss than did the trial of Adolph Beck or Dreyfus.”

LeBourdais wasn’t the only target of Ferguson’s letter-writing campaign:

In a July 11, 1967, letter to Attorney-General Wishart, Judge Ferguson briefly left off his attacks on Ms. LeBourdais and turned his sights on well-known journalist and writer Pierre Berton. He took sharp exception to Mr. Berton having described Mr. Truscott’s trial on a radio broadcast as “a mockery of justice.”

In yet another letter to Mr. Wishart, Judge Ferguson enclosed editorials from The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, which he felt had unfairly disparaged the fairness of the Truscott trial.

Ferguson’s letters appear to have mostly been dismissed by their addressees. Truscott, who spent 10 years in jail before being released on parole, is currently appearing before the Ontario Court of Appeal in an effort to secure either a retrial or a full acquittal.

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