Gerald Stanley Not Guilty
A white man shoots an indigenous man in the head, and then is found Not Guilty by a jury. It happened, ss Alyssa Joy writes: “70 km from my house where I grew up.”
I won’t state a unequivocal position on whether this was the right verdict or not. If you’d like to, feel free to do so below.
But I would like to comment on how difficult, messy, and imperfect it is for our Justice System to actually deliver “justice” as we like to think of it.
As an example, see the discussion on this thread (sorted by “Best” please) on the /r/CanadaPolitics subreddit:
Yes, it’s well known that everyone on the Internet is both a legal and firearms expert. /s But there’s enough reasonable comments on both sides here to show how tricky it is to make the “right” decision in a case with a lot of factors in it. Here’s some of the more interesting discussion points (some of which were new to me):
- The significance of witness credibility, which was sorely lacking on both side of this case.
- The criteria for manslaughter in Canada.
- The judge’s instructions to the jury when considering manslaughter as a potential verdict.
- Peremptory challenges in Canadian jury selections.
- The legal standards of “reasonable doubt”.
- How responsibility of defence counsel in Canada is split between the courts and the defendant, and how it contrasts to both the US and the UK.
- The consequences for pointing any weapon (unloaded or otherwise) in both military and civilian settings.
- What a “hang-fire” is in the context of firearms.
- The importance of timely collection of physical evidence.
- Race relations in my home province in 2018.