Métis man in U.S. prison fights to finish 149-year sentence in Canada

OTTAWA — A Métis man taken from his family as a child and adopted by American parents has gone to court to force Public Safety Minister Vic Toews to let him to serve the rest of a 149-year prison sentence in Canada.

A lawyer acting for Scott Meyers filed the legal challenge in Ottawa on Thursday seeking a court order to overturn Toews’ refusal to approve a transfer to a prison in his country of birth.

Meyers, 39, has served 17 years of his sentence for armed robbery and attempted second-degree murder in U.S. prisons.

He was born Wilfred Suth- erland to Métis parents in Winnipegosis, Man.

When he was a small child, he and six siblings were taken from their home by the provincial child and family services amid allegations that their parents were drinking.

He was later adopted by a couple in New Orleans, La., as part of the so-called “Sixties Scoop,” a Canadian program of forced assimilation of aboriginal children with white families that ran from the 1960s into the late 1980s.

The adoption by a white couple, says his Ottawa lawyer Yavar Hameed, could have been a factor in the troubled life that ended with Meyers’ conviction in 1994.

“He was kind of a dislocated youth,” Hameed said. The same year as the crime, Hameed said, the 20-year-old Meyers had just found out about his birth family back in Manitoba and initiated contact.

Meyers and two other men were charged after an incident after a party at the home of an acquaintance’s parents.

After they robbed the home, Meyers repeatedly stabbed the man in the back of the head, according to one of the other men who testified against him.

Meyers maintains that he did not participate in the assault.

He is currently serving his sentence — the equivalent of two full lifetimes — in the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

Last year, Meyers applied for the transfer back to Canada under the International Transfer of Offenders Act. Hameed says Meyers is eligible to apply because his Canadian citizenship was never vacated.

In late December, Meyers learned that Toews had rejected his application. According to the statement filed in Federal Court this week, Toews had denied the request because of the seriousness of the crime and the premise that Meyers had abandoned Canada as his place of residence.

Hameed wrote that it was “an abomination” for Toews to claim that Meyers aban- doned Canada.

“The Minister knew that the Applicant’s uprooting from his place of birth in Manitoba was done without his consent and that the Crown was directly responsible for the separation of the Applicant from his birth family, the erosion of his cultural heritage and the removal of the Applicant from Canada.”

Toews also failed to weigh these factors against the potential for rehabilitation, as the law requires, Hameed argued.

Hameed accuses Toews of “perverse approach” to transfer requests and notes the “staggering number of denials of transfer requests” by the Conservative govern- ment, compared to the Liberals, who approved all requests.

The Conservatives’ toughon-crime approach show a “punitive inclination, closed mindedness and failure to consider the rehabilitative potential of the offender,” he writes.

In several cases over the past three years, Federal Court judges have set aside decisions by Toews or his predecessors on inmate transfer cases, prompting appeals by the government.

“For privacy reasons, we cannot comment on specific cases,” Toews’ director of communications, Julie Carmichael, wrote in an email.

“However, public safety is always our No. 1 concern.”