The Ugly Canada Thread

[O-tacular]

Originally Posted by lio45

Yes, you're absolutely right. I don't intend to try to deny anyone's right to an opinion, and I hope I didn't come across that way. But just as it's fair for him to vocalize critical opinions, it's also fair for me to vocalize critical opinions of his critical opinions.

Note that even before I first posted, there were two Prairie SSPers that had both chimed in to disagree with O-tac's skepticism; I merely joined their side, I didn't invent anything here. When some trial somewhere results in a given outcome, it's way more likely than not that it's the correct one from the point of view of rendering justice. We can discuss it further of course, but I have found his arguments so far (essentially along the lines of "someone fired a gun then someone else died, a situation which should always result in a charge of manslaughter at the very least regardless of context, otherwise it's a miscarriage of justice!") to be unconvincing.

Apparently I’m not alone and there are lawyers who agree:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/...int-the-stanley-verdict/article37931748/

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/...n-procedure-is-not-fair/article37787115/

[lio45]

Originally Posted by bulliver

His racist Saskatchewan 'peers' gave him a free pass because fuck injuns....

In the recent trial of a few people involved in the Lac Mégantic rail crash there was important information (from one of the accused men's past) that the judge ruled had to be kept away from the jurors; this information was only made public after they got sequestered, so that they couldn't be influenced by it.

In a similar fashion, I'm wondering whether the judge in this Sask trial should have made sure anyone already happening to be aware of the race of the dead man was excused from jury duty on the basis of already knowing TMI, so that the fact that the guy was native could have been guaranteed to have had absolutely no influence whatsoever on the jurors' reasoning.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by O-tacular

Apparently I’m not alone and there are lawyers who agree:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/...int-the-stanley-verdict/article37931748/

Something interesting from that link...

Originally Posted by G&M article

Now let's add a couple of key truths.

Gerald Stanley, a white man, was found not guilty of murdering Colten Boushie, a young Indigenous man, by a white jury.

Suddenly sounds ominously different doesn't it? And that is the central problem in this case. Our justice system, by permitting a white jury to decide an obviously racially charged case, has let down not just Indigenous people, but all of us.

As I said in the post just above yours, a jury normally should be somewhat representative. As per wikipedia, Sask is ~15% native, so you'd expect about two aboriginal jurors on that jury, statistically.

The jury in that famous Ferguson, Missouri case for example had several blacks on it ("an ethnic breakdown that roughly reflects the racial makeup of St. Louis County", to quote the wikipedia article on the Michael Brown shooting). If that jury had instead been all white, it would certainly have raised valid questions about the selection process.


edit: I've actually now read the whole article and it explains very well how the defense maneuvered to (perfectly legally) achieve their strategic objective of an all-white jury. Had you guys started the discussion with that, you'd have had me already partially on board instantly.

[O-tacular]

Originally Posted by lio45

Something interesting from that link...



As I said in the post just above yours, a jury normally should be somewhat representative. As per wikipedia, Sask is ~15% native, so you'd expect about two aboriginal jurors on that jury, statistically.

The jury in that famous Ferguson, Missouri case for example had several blacks on it ("an ethnic breakdown that roughly reflects the racial makeup of St. Louis County", to quote the wikipedia article on the Michael Brown shooting). If that jury had instead been all white, it would certainly have raised valid questions about the selection process.


edit: I've actually now read the whole article and it explains very well how the defense maneuvered to (perfectly legally) achieve their strategic objective of an all-white jury. Had you guys started the discussion with that, you'd have had me already partially on board instantly.

Yes, the problem appears to lie with peremptory challenges which allow defence lawyers to summarily dismiss jurors based on race. Completely ridiculous.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by O-tacular

Yes, the problem appears to lie with peremptory challenges which allow defence lawyers to summarily dismiss jurors based on race. Completely ridiculous.

This G&M piece does a good job of explaining the issue too. (And it pre-dates the verdict, it was written in January, right after jury selection got completed. So it's a warning, not a reaction.)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/...n-procedure-is-not-fair/article37787115/

[O-tacular]

Originally Posted by lio45

This G&M piece does a good job of explaining the issue too. (And it pre-dates the verdict, it was written in January, right after jury selection got completed. So it's a warning, not a reaction.)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/...n-procedure-is-not-fair/article37787115/

Yeah I read that one too. How was it ever determined that lawyers should be so easily and underhandedly able to fuck with the jury selection process?

[lio45]

Originally Posted by O-tacular

Yeah I read that one too. How was it ever determined that lawyers should be so easily and underhandedly able to fuck with the jury selection process?

At first sight, a way to solve this without even needing to abolish peremptory challenges would be to say that the jury has to be within a certain % maximum deviation from the demographics of the jurisdiction where the trial is taking place.

Say you're having a trial in a place in BC that's 75% Chinese and 25% Anglo, you can use all the peremptory challenges you want but in the end the jury will have to have at least 8 Chinese-Canadians and at most 10 Chinese-Canadians.

Or say it's the Jian Ghomeshi trial, you can use all the peremptory challenges you want but you won't be able to end up with an all-male jury (if you're the defense) or an all-female jury (if you're the prosecution) ; the jury will have to have at least 5 women and at most 7 women, in the end. (Or at least 4 women and at most 8 women, if we want to make the deviation requirements looser.)

etc.

It would be more complicated and take longer to assemble a jury, but that's of course the price to pay, and it seems a no brainer to pay it IMO.

Of course in practice it's not going to be as simple as that (for example the state of being an ethnic Chinese is something that's a continuum; also, do you have to still be fluent in the language to count? Some Canadians born and raised here happen to be ethnically Chinese but thoroughly typical Anglo in every possible way including being uniligual English speakers; how should such people be counted? etc.) but the way I see it, even with all the possible imperfections and loopholes this idea would already be a major improvement generally.

[O-tacular]

Originally Posted by lio45

At first sight, a way to solve this without even needing to abolish peremptory challenges would be to say that the jury has to be within a certain % maximum deviation from the demographics of the jurisdiction where the trial is taking place.

Say you're having a trial in a place in BC that's 75% Chinese and 25% Anglo, you can use all the peremptory challenges you want but in the end the jury will have to have at least 8 Chinese-Canadians and at most 10 Chinese-Canadians.

Or say it's the Jian Ghomeshi trial, you can use all the peremptory challenges you want but you won't be able to end up with an all-male jury (if you're the defense) or an all-female jury (if you're the prosecution) ; the jury will have to have at least 5 women and at most 7 women, in the end. (Or at least 4 women and at most 8 women, if we want to make the deviation requirements looser.)

etc.

It would be more complicated and take longer to assemble a jury, but that's of course the price to pay, and it seems a no brainer to pay it IMO.

Of course in practice it's not going to be as simple as that (for example the state of being an ethnic Chinese is something that's a continuum; also, do you have to still be fluent in the language to count? Some Canadians born and raised here happen to be ethnically Chinese but thoroughly typical Anglo in every possible way including being uniligual English speakers; how should such people be counted? etc.) but the way I see it, even with all the possible imperfections and loopholes this idea would already be a major improvement generally.

Or we could just do like the Americans and make it so lawyers can’t use their peremptive challenges in a discriminatory manor.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by lio45

At first sight, a way to solve this without even needing to abolish peremptory challenges would be to say that the jury has to be within a certain % maximum deviation from the demographics of the jurisdiction where the trial is taking place.

Can't either side launch these challenges? It seems a bit weird that it would be possible for the prosecution alone to use their veto power to select out 50% of the pool if this really is so critical. If they were vetoing all of the native jurors the defence could veto all of the white ones and in the end they exhaust their peremptory challenges and are left with a random jury. Maybe there is more to it than this.

Is it possible that the defence saw factors other than race that they thought were more strategically valuable? For example maybe as the defence you happened to get a super unsympathetic native guy so you decided to get rid of him even though on average native guys are more sympathetic. Statistics aren't necessarily meaningful when it comes to individual cases.

To me it seems like the whole justice system is pretty bad if it depends on stacking the deck one way or the other according to racial biases. Theoretically it should not depend on race at all one way or the other.

Another weird thing I see is statistics about conviction rates presented without important context about false convictions or acquittals. Let's say a white jury is 2x more likely to convict a native defendant than a native jury. What does this mean? Are the white juries convicting 50% innocent native people? Are the native juries acquitting 50% of native criminals? The conviction rates alone don't mean anything. What you want is accuracy, not merely a high or low rate.

[osirisboy]

Originally Posted by O-tacular

The simple fact agreed upon by everyone is that he was holding a gun when he ran up to the car and shot Colton Boushie in the back of the head. There can be debate about degrees of murder but for him to be completely acquitted is insane. It probably would have been a miscarriage of justice if he only got manslaughter but this is O.J. level insane.

Yes I’ve been to the US. What’s your point? Our racism is less overt but Canada’s track record with Indigenous people is undeniable.

My point was that you didn't seem very knowledgeable. Also, You're taking this one case and making a sweeping generalization and applying it across the country. I think it's a bit more complex than that

[O-tacular]

Originally Posted by osirisboy

My point was that you didn't seem very knowledgeable. Also, You're taking this one case and making a sweeping generalization and applying it across the country. I think it's a bit more complex than that

If anything you appear uninformed if you don’t know about the systemic issues faced by first nations. Are the hundreds of missing and murdered aboriginal women not another prime example? 80% of people incarcerated in Saskatchewan are natives.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by someone123

Can't either side launch these challenges?

Pretty sure both sides can... and as you say, if both sides have an equal number of peremptory challenges, the jury composition will be random in the end (and statistically likely to be representative) unless one side is too stupid to use them the same way the other side does. So there could be something more to it.

It seems a bit weird that it would be possible for the prosecution alone to use their veto power to select out 50% of the pool if this really is so critical. If they were vetoing all of the native jurors the defence could veto all of the white ones and in the end they exhaust their peremptory challenges and are left with a random jury. Maybe there is more to it than this.

Is it possible that the defence saw factors other than race that they thought were more strategically valuable? For example maybe as the defence you happened to get a super unsympathetic native guy so you decided to get rid of him even though on average native guys are more sympathetic. Statistics aren't necessarily meaningful when it comes to individual cases.

In all of the above you've got prosecution and defense reversed, but otherwise it's all stuff I can agree with.

In theory as you say the prosecution should have spent all their peremptory challenges eliminating white jurors and provided they have the same number of those as the defense, the jury will statistically have 2 native/métis and 10 non-native Saskatchewanians (if selected on a province-wide basis), unless the jurors are selected from a smaller local jurisdiction only (which may happen to be nearly all white, which would explain everything: the random jury we ended up with after both sides exhausted their vetoes turned out all white, as statistically expected).

[SaskScraper]

Western Producer newspaper predicted a year before this event leading up to this week's Saskatchewan murder trial that someone could get hurt if business owners like Gerald Stanley tried to deter robbers like Colton Boushie.

https://www.producer.com/2015/01/when-thieves-come-calling/

a very similar example of another farm business robbery:

DeSchryver and his wife had just gone to bed one night in November around 10 when they heard the sound of vehicles in their farmyard.
At first they thought friends had stopped by but soon discovered three trucks had backed up to their Quonset and the lights were on inside.

An all-terrain vehicle was already running and thieves were in the process of stealing other things from the implement shop.
DeSchryver yelled at the perpetrators as he pulled on his work boots and then ran toward the trucks and five thieves, who he said were scrambling to get out of the yard.
The first truck hit DeSchryver as it stormed out of the driveway. The impact spun him around and knocked him down.

The second truck wildly drove straight for him, driving over one of his feet.
His wife was outside by this point and trying to help him up as the third truck came straight for them at a high speed. He said it swerved away at the last second. The shocked couple was able to call 911.

DeSchryver said it was a stroke of luck he was wearing his steel toe and shank work boots.
“If I had just had runners on, it would have probably been a different story,” he said.

In that Western Producer article, sgt. Carl Dinsdale of the Battleford RCMP rural detachment in Saskatchewan had reported that vehicles worth more than $2 million have been stolen in the Battlefords, Biggar, Unity, Cut Knife, Maidstone, Rosetown, Rosthern and Warman detachment areas in almost three years. Same area of Saskatchewan as the Colton Boushie death.
The Battlefords rural RCMP de-tachment has had 385 complaints of stolen vehicles, trailers, ATVs and snowmobiles from January 2012 to 2015.

With RCMP assistance sometimes over an hour from some rural areas and with rural business invasions & robberies up 18% in the last 5 years alone, farmers feel they have to carry firearms for the protection of their families.


http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/sask-farmer-firearms-to-feel-safe-1.3773373

Waiting for RCMP to respond to farm home invasions seem futile.



http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/senior-beaten-tied-up-in-farm-home-invasion-1.935914

Not all business owners that are robbed have happy endings though



https://saskatoon.ctvnews.ca/three-charged-in-death-of-la-ronge-restaurant-owner-1.3390798

National media has been focusing on this racially charged murder trial for over last 18 months since the event and feeding into the frenzy, but had Gerald Stanley been the one to have died that day when Colton Boushie & his team of accomplices premeditated to trespassed & attempted to commit robbery, we wouldn't have heard a peep in national news about this incident.

[osirisboy]

Originally Posted by O-tacular

If anything you appear uninformed if you don’t know about the systemic issues faced by first nations. Are the hundreds of missing and murdered aboriginal women not another prime example? 80% of people incarcerated in Saskatchewan are natives.

Except that's not what you were saying. You were taking that one incident and drawing conclusions and making comparisons with the us. Makes no sense

[VANRIDERFAN]

Originally Posted by SaskScraper

Western Producer newspaper predicted a year before this event leading up to this week's Saskatchewan murder trial that someone could get hurt if business owners like Gerald Stanley tried to deter robbers like Colton Boushie.

https://www.producer.com/2015/01/when-thieves-come-calling/

a very similar example of another farm business robbery:



In that Western Producer article, sgt. Carl Dinsdale of the Battleford RCMP rural detachment in Saskatchewan had reported that vehicles worth more than $2 million have been stolen in the Battlefords, Biggar, Unity, Cut Knife, Maidstone, Rosetown, Rosthern and Warman detachment areas in almost three years. Same area of Saskatchewan as the Colton Boushie death.
The Battlefords rural RCMP de-tachment has had 385 complaints of stolen vehicles, trailers, ATVs and snowmobiles from January 2012 to 2015.

With RCMP assistance sometimes over an hour from some rural areas and with rural business invasions & robberies up 18% in the last 5 years alone, farmers feel they have to carry firearms for the protection of their families.


http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/sask-farmer-firearms-to-feel-safe-1.3773373

Waiting for RCMP to respond to farm home invasions seem futile.



http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/senior-beaten-tied-up-in-farm-home-invasion-1.935914

Not all business owners that are robbed have happy endings though



https://saskatoon.ctvnews.ca/three-charged-in-death-of-la-ronge-restaurant-owner-1.3390798

National media has been focusing on this racially charged murder trial for over last 18 months since the event and feeding into the frenzy, but had Gerald Stanley been the one to have died that day when Colton Boushie & his team of accomplices premeditated to trespassed & attempted to commit robbery, we wouldn't have heard a peep in national news about this incident.

Hey that is not the correct narrative. A racist white farmer who is on stolen land decided to waste a poor native youth who was innocently minding his own business.

[O-tacular]

That certainly helps to explain some of the extreme level of tension. Gives a bit more context to the case. However, I still think Stanley should have been charged with manslaughter at a minimum. The jury probably exonerated him as a form of retribution.

[WhipperSnapper]

well said.

sorry if this was said before

The precedence being set by the acquittal is extremely dangerous. This is exactly the route the US has taken to get to the current FUBAR situation

[lio45]

Originally Posted by SaskScraper

With RCMP assistance sometimes over an hour from some rural areas and with rural business invasions & robberies up 18% in the last 5 years alone, farmers feel they have to carry firearms for the protection of their families.

And this is why it kind of makes sense to have a local jury who understands such local realities.

With an all-Canadian jury that could include some urbanites who have never seen either a gun or an aboriginal person in their lives, you're almost certain that some context will be lost on them.

That's why I suggested above that it's possible that a random local jury could be both all white and statistically representative, even if Sask is ~15% native. (Replying to someone123's valid point that if both sides have the same number of peremptory challenges and use them all, the jury composition will end up being random.)

Similarly, if a complex crime is committed in Mtl's West Island and all the actors of the drama are Anglos, we're better off with a jury that's a representative sample of the West Island than with a jury that's a representative slice of Québec (as most of the jurors will be from far away and will only speak French).

[Acajack]

The media coverage of the Stanley-Boushie verdict has been just brutal. Actually, I am a bit depressed by it.

The article from CBC's Ottawa station about the protest on Parliament Hill after the verdict said that Boushie and his friends stopped at the Stanley farm to get help after their car got a flat tire.

Really? Even Boushie's friends in their testimony confirmed that that was not the case.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by SaskScraper

Western Producer newspaper predicted a year before this event leading up to this week's Saskatchewan murder trial that someone could get hurt if business owners like Gerald Stanley tried to deter robbers like Colton Boushie.

https://www.producer.com/2015/01/when-thieves-come-calling/

a very similar example of another farm business robbery:



In that Western Producer article, sgt. Carl Dinsdale of the Battleford RCMP rural detachment in Saskatchewan had reported that vehicles worth more than $2 million have been stolen in the Battlefords, Biggar, Unity, Cut Knife, Maidstone, Rosetown, Rosthern and Warman detachment areas in almost three years. Same area of Saskatchewan as the Colton Boushie death.
The Battlefords rural RCMP de-tachment has had 385 complaints of stolen vehicles, trailers, ATVs and snowmobiles from January 2012 to 2015.

With RCMP assistance sometimes over an hour from some rural areas and with rural business invasions & robberies up 18% in the last 5 years alone, farmers feel they have to carry firearms for the protection of their families.


http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/sask-farmer-firearms-to-feel-safe-1.3773373

Waiting for RCMP to respond to farm home invasions seem futile.



http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/senior-beaten-tied-up-in-farm-home-invasion-1.935914

Not all business owners that are robbed have happy endings though



https://saskatoon.ctvnews.ca/three-charged-in-death-of-la-ronge-restaurant-owner-1.3390798

National media has been focusing on this racially charged murder trial for over last 18 months since the event and feeding into the frenzy, but had Gerald Stanley been the one to have died that day when Colton Boushie & his team of accomplices premeditated to trespassed & attempted to commit robbery, we wouldn't have heard a peep in national news about this incident.

I have no idea of the scale of this phenomenon, but after reading these articles the two words that popped into my mind were "South" and "Africa".

That kinda scared me.