‘Justice for Colten’ — rage over a verdict
Anger builds across country over acquittal in fatal shooting of young Indigenous man
If you are going about your business without a break in your step this weekend, with nary a thought for Colten Boushie, ask yourself why that is so.
Why is it that Friday night’s not guilty verdict in the young man’s death, which is a moment of national shame, does not shake you to your core? Why has the grief and outrage that led spontaneously to more than a dozen protests across Canada the day after the verdict not enraged you, not fired up your fears for your children’s future, and not driven you to speak up against repeated centu- ries-old injustice enacted under your nose?
Do you see how indifference makes us all complicit?
Battleford, Sask., might as well be America from the 1950s. An all-white jury in a court presided by a white judge found Gerald Stanley, a white farmer charged with second-degree murder, not guilty after a bullet from his gun killed 22-year-old Boushie, an Indigenous man from the Red Pheasant First Nation.
In the selection of the jury for the trial — where lawyers are allowed to use “peremptory challenges” to reject a potential juror without giving any reason — every single Indigenous person who showed up was rejected.
“Indigenous people are tired of being part of a justice system that excludes them. Tired of being tried by white judges and juries and then thrown into jails that in some parts of Canada — Saskatchewan, Manitoba and in northern Ontario — are almost entirely Indigenous,” says my colleague Tanya Talaga, author of the bestselling Seven Fallen Feathers, in which she chronicled the lives and deaths of seven First Nations students who left their homes and families so they could get a high school education.
The issue of makeup of juries is not new.
Former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci reviewed Ontario’s jury roll system for a year following legal challenges from First Nations families and organizations, and released his report in 2013. OPINION
At a Thunder Bay press conference then, he said there was widespread systemic racism in the courts, justice and police systems in the north.
“He warned that if nothing was done, any true hope of reconciliation between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people would disappear,” Talaga says.
“He is correct. There can be no reconciliation without rights.”
This demand for Indigenous civil and political rights is met with the same askance and skepticism from non-Indigenous Canadians as U.S. civil rights activists received from other Americans in the 1950s and ’60s.
During the Stanley trial, his shooting of Boushie was justified by the barest of all plausible reasons: an accident. The trigger for the semiautomatic gun had to be pulled for a shot to be fired. Two bullets had already been fired as warning shots, the defence said.
The defence lawyer blamed the shooting of the third bullet, the one that went through Boushie’s head, on something called “hang fire.” That is a delay from when the shot is fired to when the bullet leaves the gun.
Plausible, perhaps, except experts had testified that delay is not only rare, it’s also very short — less than one second.
Boushie and his friends were returning home on Aug. 9, 2016, after a day of swimming and some drinking, when their car had a flat tire. They had tried to steal a truck on a farm, but failed. They then drove to Stanley’s property, where they tried to start an ATV.
This led to yelling and shouting and a hammer to the windshield of the car Boushie was in, and finally his death. He was still in the car.
Many people have pounced on this element of imperfection in the victims to rationalize the shooting of Boushie.
If death is an acceptable outcome for trespassing and attempting to steal, then it should follow that Indigenous people be allowed a free hand with settlers who have grabbed their land and stolen its resources by hook and crook.
Why then are they now being asked for restraint after the verdict? For calm? Forgive us, for we know not what we do — even when we kill you. What blinding nature of selfabsorption is this?
But it has been thus for so long we see no aberration in it: White man kills Indigenous person and lawfully walks free.
Due process once again needs no tweaking when the outcome favours the privileged.
Earlier, before the trial, the RCMP had lost the vehicle in which Boushie was killed. Then, “the Mounties waited a strangely long time to charge Stanley in the aftermath of the shooting,” wrote Kyle Edwards in Maclean’s. “No matter how you dissect the case, Stanley was given virtually every advantage from the outset.”
The jury had been instructed to find Stanley guilty of murder if they believed he intended to kill. If the jurors determined Stanley was merely careless in discharging the firearm, they could have found him guilty of manslaughter.
As it turned out they found him not guilty of anything.
This means they believed Stanley acted reasonably when he killed Boushie.
If this doesn’t fill our minds with rage and our hearts with despair, then it tells us a lot about who we really are. What a shame. Shree Paradkar writes about discrimination and identity. You can follow her @shreeparadkar