His mother was a homemaker and his father, who was a presser in a dry-cleaning business, had a drinking problem and a mean streak. Roméo Phillion and his twin, Donald, were born on April 29, 1939, in Cobalt, Ont., the fourth and fifth of Yvonne and Wilfred Phillion's nine children. Everything about his case – his story – makes me ill." "It was very easy to go after Roméo Phillion. "He was never able to weigh pros and cons of his actions," said Win Wahrer, AIDWYC's director of client services. There he was, on daises in a wheelchair, toting an oxygen tank as he addressed crowds in brief sentences punctuated with coughing fits as he caught his breath, a diminutive warrior in the battle for other voiceless prisoners who, like him, were wrongfully imprisoned.Īnd the lawyers and staff at the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC), who engineered his unprecedented release on bail in the summer of 2003 as he waited for a ministerial review of the conviction, became his extended family. Phillion found his voice – cranky, impassioned and funny. He was 76.Ī victim of long-buried police evidence and society's tendency to stereotype the poor and voiceless, in the end, Mr. It also illustrates the sometimes misguided spirit that kept him going until his sudden death on Monday in a Mississauga hospital from complications related to emphysema. Phillion's bitterness and frustration during his 31 1/2 years behind bars for the 1967 murder of Ottawa firefighter Leo Roy. "It's nice to be doing time for something I'm actually guilty of," he told the sentencing judge. Upon exiting with about $2,000, he caught a cab back to prison, where he was immediately arrested and sentenced to four years, to be served concurrently with the life term.
On an unauthorized furlough from Frontenac minimum-security prison in 1990, Roméo Phillion, who had already served 18 years of a life sentence for a murder he did not commit, headed into downtown Kingston, walked into a bank and informed a teller he had a gun and wanted cash.