Donald Marshall Jr, born on September 13, 1953 in Sydney, Nova Scotia, was a Mi’kmaq man from Canada who was accused of murdering acquaintance Sandy Seale when he was seventeen. Marshall and Seale had been walking together in Wentworth Park after a dance. Soon, they were approached by Roy Ebsary and Jimmy MacNeil, who asked them for a light. During that ensuing scuffle, Seale was killed.
Marshall was arrested and charged for the murder, and was convicted less than six months later. However, Marshall was not guilty of murdering Seale. He spent eleven years in prison before being released on parole in 1982. Ebsary, who seemed to have been the real murderer, was convicted of manslaughter and received a sentence of three years.
In 1990, Marshall was exonerated with a royal commission, and then was awarded $700,000 of compensation.
In 2007, he married Colleen D’Orsay, who, in 2008, reported that Marshall had only received $156,000 of compensation from another sum of nearly $2,000,000 promised to him from the Atlantic Policy Congress of First Nations Chiefs Secretariat.
Other than a few minor encounters with the law, Marshall lived an ordinary life until he died at 55, a symbol for wrongful conviction and trying to find justice.
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