From jail to justice

Darah Hansen

Corey Robinson isn't a man to show a lot of emotion, much less cry. But, today, tears roll down his face. He apologizes quietly and squints his hazel eyes to try and hold the tears back.

We sit for a moment, silently.

"Normally," he says, almost choking, "I don't cry _ Even in the worst situations I couldn't cry. But, now that I've got my life back, it just happens sometimes."

Hearing his story, most people wouldn't fault him for the indulgence.

For the past nine years, Robinson, 32, has been behind bars, after two juries found him guilty of the 1992 murder of his neighbour and close friend, Richmond resident Lori Aiston. He was sentenced both times to a term of 10 years.

If he did it, the punishment seems too light; after all, Aiston wasn't just killed. By all accounts, it was a vicious and brutal murder.

The pretty, 22-year-old woman was repeatedly stabbed, kicked and beaten in her apartment on Colonial Drive in Richmond, then dragged and left to bleed to death on her two-year-old daughter's bed. All the while her baby was with her, unable to do anything but watch.

But Robinson has always maintained he didn't do it - a statement that gained strength on June 13 when the B.C. Court of Appeal kicked out his conviction on the grounds there was never any evidence to arrest him in the first place.

It took Robinson two trials and two appeals to get to that point.

For Neil Cobb, Robinson's lawyer, it was a momentous day. He and his wife, Kathleen Mell, have worked for his release since day one of his conviction.

Today, Cobb counts his client firmly among the Milgaards, Morins and Sophonows of the Canadian justice system.

"I believe 100 per cent that Corey is innocent," Cobb says. "And that's not a luxury we're afforded very often in this job."

For Robinson, the taste of freedom has been bittersweet: a mixture of intense joy and hand-to-mouth survival. His nine years in jail have cost him dearly.

His wife left him years ago. He is estranged from his family. His faith in humanity is understandably damaged. And, adding insult to injury, he can't find anyone who will hire him.

"I'm collecting bottles, doing whatever I can," Robinson says of his paltry means of making ends meet.

"It's pretty hard to explain away when you've got a nine or 10-year gap in your resum‚," says Cobb.

Cobb says Robinson was nothing short of a patsy for police from the very beginning. The only evidence ever found linking him to the scene of the murder was a microscopic amount of his DNA detected under Aiston's fingernails.

And that was found to be an insufficient fact upon which to base a guilty verdict, said appellant judges in the 2003 ruling.

DNA found on a bloody paper towel found at the scene, meanwhile, did not belong to either Aiston or Robinson.

It was only after a "so-called" confession, Cobb says, made after heavy interrogation by Surrey police officer, Sgt. Don Adam, in December 1994, that the RCMP were even able to lay a charge.

But that confession was bogus - a point Cobb successfully argued when he took the case before B.C. Court of Appeal for the first time in 1999.

With an IQ of just 75, well below-average intelligence, Robinson was particularly susceptible to police suggestion, Cobb says.

In her written reasons for judgment released in February 2000, Madam Justice Hoddart agreed.

"The violation of (Robinson's) right to seek the advice of a lawyer is particularly serious in this case because the appellant's intellectual functioning is at the lowest level of normal. This fact may not have been apparent to Sergeant Adam; he gave Mr. Robinson little chance to speak _"

She found: "At all times Sergeant Adam considered Mr. Robinson a viable suspect, although he knew the investigating officers did not consider they had reasonable and probable grounds to charge him with Ms. Aiston's murder, until after his morning interview."

Robinson vividly remembers the day he was arrested.

"The officers took me in and they started drilling questions at me. They wouldn't let me go home. They kept saying, 'If you tell us that you did it, we'll let you go home.' It was too much to take," he says in a slow and deliberate voice.

"The next thing you know, I'm being charged. From there, my whole life went downhill."

Jail, says Robinson, is an experience he wouldn't wish upon his worst enemy.

"There's been times we'd get locked up for a beating, a stabbing, some stupidity," he says. "It's like living in your bathroom," he says of the cells. "It robs you of your dignity."

His cell mates were "scammers."

"There was a few, I could say, that were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. There's a few I saw come and go and then come back again," he recalls.

Robinson is not a particularly verbal man. But today, he wants to talk; a chance to tell his story.

"It was hard," he says of prison life. "There were times where I didn't know if I was coming or going. But you throw yourself in jail mode. I was always doing other things to occupy my time, doing things to make me think I wasn't in jail."

He sits hunched forward in a high, wing-back chair in his lawyer's office on East Pender Street in Vancouver, not far from the $350 a month apartment he rents.

Dressed in a blue striped T-shirt and black jeans, he looks clean and tidy. His black hair is cut short and neatly combed back; his only adornments a black leather fanny-pack and gold chain around his neck.

With his dark skin and hair, he looks possibly native Indian. He's not, he says - it's the only comment he'll make about his family.

Surrey Pretrial was the worst of the three institutions he served time in, including Matsqui and Mission penitentiaries.

"It's like army camp. Some of the guards play head games, some try and push your buttons," he says. As for the inmates, "There are people from the worst-level junkies to people who always like to start fights."

Despite the hell he endured, Robinson is proud he always managed to keep his head above water. He worked as a painter in the jail. He tackled his addiction to cigarettes, chewing tobacco and caffeine. He went to the prison chapel every Sunday.

"I was the inmate role model. I didn't get into trouble. I was always polite to (the guards) even though I didn't want to be.

"I just knew I was coming out some day."

June 13 - ironically a Friday - is the day Robinson won his freedom.

He had just come out of lock-down - where prisoners are confined to their cells for a head count - at the Mission prison when he got a telephone call from Cobb's legal assistant telling him the courts had granted him an acquittal.

"'You're a free man,' she said. I said, 'In real terms, what does that mean? Because I'm still here.'"

By 4 p.m. he was driving away from the prison toward Vancouver after arranging a ride with a friend.

"If it wasn't for my TV or certain other items, I would have just left everything and walked to Vancouver."

He spent his first night of freedom at the Lookout Emergency Shelter in the Downtown Eastside. From there, he's found his own place nearby and has begun the slow process of putting the pieces of his shattered life back together.

It's proving more difficult than he imagined. He spends most of his days hunting for work or trying to scare up enough cash so he can eat. He's signed up for welfare and the food bank. He does his best to avoid the police.

Yeah, life is tough but he'll take it over jail, any day, he says.

Thoughts of his friend, Lori Aiston, rarely cross his mind anymore.

"It hurts so much.

"It's hard to cope with my past, my being incarcerated," he says. "To think about somebody who's passed away on wrong terms or wrongful death, it's a nightmare.

"I don't even know what she looks like anymore."