Canada’s women in justice share cases
Each personal account teaches a lesson, some with personal touches
The story about a woman known only as S is more than enough to break your heart. Her story is one in this collection of seventeen true accounts of women coming up against the Canadian justice system.
“S” has served more time in prison than any Canadian woman presently incarcerated in the country. She’s Indigenous. She spent 11 years in residential schools where teachers abused her. Her parents were alcoholics. Her husband beat her. The event that got S a very long jail sentence sounds more like suicide than murder. Still, S has never stopped trying to survive. Women in Criminal Justice is the fourth book in Durvile’s True Cases series of stories, lectures and reminiscences written by Canadian defence lawyers, Crown Attorneys, judges and others connected to the country’s justice system, and with a foreword by retired Supreme Court chief justice Beverley McLachlan. What makes the stories in this collection different from the first three is that all the stories here are written by women.
A couple of the pieces work as straight ahead lectures. They come across as worthy, if not exactly the stuff of entertainment. Easier to relate to are those that concentrate on individuals who have tangled with the Canadian Criminal Code.
Kaysi Fagan, a Calgary de- fence lawyer, for instance, writes lucidly, humanely and in mildly comic fashion about her adventures defending a woman named Pearl who is busted for trafficking in half a million dollars’ worth of high-quality marijuana. The twist? Pearl is seventy. Much worse, during the four years in which the very determined Fagan negotiates to keep Pearl out of prison, Pearl’s health declines under the strains of her experiences, changing from lively at 70 to frail at 74.
There’s a lesson in all of this, as there is in each story. Fagan writes that Pearl, who was poor and deprived in both financial and social terms, just needed “someone to take an interest in her life.”
Fagan is hardly the only writer who takes her client’s cause more than a little personally. Toronto’s Barbara Jackman, an ace of the Canadian immigration bar, writes affectingly about the long and twisted case of a client of hers named Mahmoud Jaballah, originally of Egypt. Jaballah wanted to live in Canada with his wife and six children. When he applied to stay here, the immigration officials made immediate and persistent moves to deport him. He might, you know, be a terrorist. Nobody seems to have produced evidence that this was a possibility, but Jaballah’s struggle stretched over17 years, six of which he spent in custody. To say the process was contrary is to understate the situation drastically. What happened to Jaballah was bumbling and cruel and painfully protracted before Jackman won him the right to remain in Canada.
It was Jackman as his principal counsel who ultimately prevailed though she, too, paid an emotional toll for her success. “I found that I cried half the time that I talked about what was happening (to Jaballah),” she writes, “even when I was making submissions to the Court.”
Another woman especially devoted to the victim whose cause she has championed is Kim Pate. Pate — the long-time head of the Elizabeth Fry Society and now Senator Pate — wrote the piece about S, the Indigenous woman who holds the record for imprisonment. Pate sounds just a little helpless and frustrated when she describes S’s present circumstances, but Pate, like the other women who describe their experiences in the book, also sounds entirely sincere about her continuing intentions.
“I will not rest until S is freed,” the senator says. “The least we can do is to make room for her to experience the dignity of her last few years with those who love and care for her.”