SAINT JOHN, N.B — “People ask me what it’s like to do a life sentence,” says Robert Mailman. “You go home and stay in there for 20 years, and that’s what it’s f**king like.”

On Jan. 4, 2024, Mailman sat outside Courtroom No. 14 of the Saint John’s Courthouse, waiting for the end of a 40-year battle to prove his innocence. “This is going to be my last fight,” he whispered.

Mailman, aged 76, was bone-thin and weak from terminal cancer, but remained confident that the hearing would go his way. “All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men couldn’t bring down a small man named Bob,” he joked on the drive to the courthouse.

For a long time, it had seemed that they really couldn’t bring Mailman down. Back in the 1970s and ’80s, the Saint John police department kept building weak cases agains

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