The Leighton Hay Case

The Case of Leighton Hay

Leighton Hay was a 19-year-old Jamaican-born Canadian citizen who was wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder in 2002. This started with an altercation that broke out at midnight when four men and a woman tried to enter a nightclub without paying a cover charge. Later, those intruders left but three men with handguns came into the club and two of them made it into the kitchen where they shot Colin Moore eight times who was the brother of the person who was organizing the event that was taking place that evening (Roger Moore). In the kitchen, there were two more people aside from the brothers, Colin’s wife (Jennifer Moore) and a friend (Leisa Maillard). Jennifer ended up identifying one of the shooters as Gary Eunick.

The license plates of the cars that the gunman used to escape belonged to Lydia Hay, Leighton’s mother. When police arrested Hay he did not have the dreadlocks so upon searching the home police found short hairs wrapped in a newspaper in the garbage. Hay stated that he had shaved his face two days prior but the police were convinced that he had come home and shaved his head in order to disguise his appearance. He was then arrested. In 2010, the Supreme Court of Canada approved the order seeking further scientific testing of the hair found in his home. Microscopic examination showed that the hairs were facial hairs, not head hairs thus making the prosecution theory that Leighton had shaved his head to disguise his appearance unsustainable. Hay spent around 12 and a half years in prison before his release in 2013. The case against him relied on unreliable witness testimony and flawed forensic evidence. Hay's wrongful conviction had a significant impact on his life, and he later received a settlement from the government of Ontario for

She was shown photographs which included Hay’s photograph (taken 18 months earlier) and she selected him as an 80% likeness. Three weeks later, she was shown a sequence of photographs which included one of Hay (taken hours after the murder) and she did not select any photograph. At a second identification process, Maillard didn’t select any photographs and, when shown the photograph of Hay she stated that he looked very different and that in his arrest photo, he did not have a gaunt face like that of the second gunman at the club. An article by Pezdek, Abed & Cormia (2021) explores the relationship between stress and eyewitness memory accuracy, as well as the relationship between stress and eyewitness confidence. They found that stress impairs the accuracy of eyewitness memory but not the confidence-accuracy relationship. This means that individuals under stress may recall events less accurately, but still have high confidence in their recollections. This is evident with eyewitness Maillard as she was present during the shooting, which means it is plausible that she may have experienced trauma and even stress during the investigations as she had to live through the traumatic experience again, especially when telling officers her experience. This might have played a role in her judgement and accuracy of recalling what happened that night, but she was also quite confident that it