The state, criminal justice politics and the Nova Scotia Royal Commission on the Donald Marshall, Jr., Prosecution

Abstract

Donald Marshall, Jr., a sixteen-year old Micmac Indian, was wrongfully convicted of the murder of a Black youth named Sandy Seale in Sydney, Nova Scotia in 1971. Eleven years later, Marshall was exonerated, but at the same time, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeals blamed him for causing the miscarriage of justice. In 1986, the government of Nova Scotia, in response to public, media and political pressure, established a Royal Commission to find out why the justice system failed in the Marshall Case. The thesis argues that Marshall's arrest, conviction and imprisonment were the result of incompetence and racial prejudice compounded by a cultural blindness of criminal justice professionals which placed Marshall in a state of dependence from which he was powerless to escape for eleven years. When Marshall eventually won his freedom, the response of the criminal justice system was to blame the victim of the miscarriage in an attempt to restore an aura of legitimacy to the system. Finally, the thesis argues that the work of the Royal Commission, by exposing the complex interaction of various levels of the criminal justice system and the concomitant political and social conflicts at work in the case, supports the theory that the criminal justice system operates with a degree of relative autonomy within the context of the Canadian State.