When Carleton criminology professor Darryl Davies taught a sociology course at a Saskatchewan penitentiary in 1976, he had no idea that one of their convictions would be famously overturned.
Davies’ former student, David Milgaard, died at the age of 69 in Cochrane, Alberta on May 15. But in 1969, Milgaard was a 16-year-old Winnipeg boy passing through Saskatchewan with friends. The time coincided with the discovery of nurse Gail Miller’s body in a Saskatoon snowbank.
Milgaard was convicted of her rape and murder a year later and spent the next 23 years in prison, for a crime he didn’t commit.
In 1976, when Milgaard was just 23, he became one of Davies’ students. Davies was working for the Saskatchewan Law Reform Commission and was asked by the University of Saskatchewan to teach a first-year sociology class in the penitentiary….