Roundtable discussion: Kent Roach

Jackman Law Building, University of Toronto, 78 Queen's Park Cres W, Toronto, ON
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No registration required | Light lunch provided

Kent Roach will participate in a constitutional roundtable to discuss his latest book, Canadian Justice, Indigenous Injustice: The Gerald Stanley and Colten Boushie Case. The discussion will be held in room J140 of the Jackman Law Building at University of Toronto, and is sponsored by the David Asper Centre for Constitional Rights and University of Toronto Faculty of Law.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In August 2016 Colten Boushie, a twenty-two-year-old Cree man from Red Pheasant First Nation, was fatally shot on a Saskatchewan farm by white farmer Gerald Stanley. In a trial that bitterly divided Canadians, Stanley was acquitted of both murder and manslaughter by a jury in Battleford with no visible Indigenous representation.

In Canadian Justice, Indigenous Injustice Kent Roach critically reconstructs the Gerald Stanley/Colten Boushie case to examine how it may be a miscarriage of justice. Roach provides historical, legal, political, and sociological background to the case including misunderstandings over crime when Treaty 6 was negotiated, the 1885 hanging of eight Indigenous men at Fort Battleford, the role of the RCMP, prior litigation over Indigenous underrepresentation on juries, and the racially charged debate about defence of property and rural crime. Drawing on both trial transcripts and research on miscarriages of justice, Roach looks at jury selection, the controversial “hang fire” defence, how the credibility and beliefs of Indigenous witnesses were challenged on the stand, and Gerald Stanley's implicit appeals to self-defence and defence of property, as well as the decision not to appeal the acquittal.

Kent Roach, CM, FRSC, is the Prichard-Wilson Chair in Law and Public Policy at the University of Toronto and the author of numerous books on Canadian criminal justice.