She Was Only Three: The Trials of John Thomas James Jr

Charlotte Neff is chair of the Department of Law and Justice at
Laurentian University and the co-author of The Annotated Competition Act
1992.

She Was Only Three is a detailed account of the prosecution, in adult
court, of an individual who was 17 at the time of the crime. Although
charged with and twice convicted of first-degree murder, the accused was
ultimately convicted of manslaughter in the killing of a 3-year-old girl
who had been sexually assaulted prior to her death. The central legal
issue in the case was the admissibility, under the Young Offenders Act,
of information received from the suspect in the form of statements,
confessions, and a re-enactment of the events leading to the murder.

This emotional account by one of the prosecutors in the case includes
four police pictures of the dead girl and is clearly calculated to
inflame public opinion against the justice system. While the police must
be allowed to conduct thorough investigations, we must guard against
questionable police tactics that, in an unsettling number of instances,
have led to wrongful convictions. Sympathy for a victim can never
justify the violation of procedural rules in the collection of evidence
and elicitation of confessions. Montgomery’s book fails to achieve a
much-needed balance between the interests of victims and the rights of
accused.