Justice Denied: The Law Versus Donald Marshall

L.J. Rouse was a freelance writer in Toronto.

On May 28, 1971, black teenager Sandy Scale was murdered in Sydney, Nova Scotia. Under severe pressure from both local and special interest groups, the police were quick to make an arrest. Donald Marshall, a Micmac Indian, was convicted of the crime, and sentenced to life imprisonment. For 11 years, in Dorchester and Springhill penetentiaries, Marshall’s youth ebbed away: throughout the ordeal, he maintained his innocence. Then, piece by painful piece, the truth began to emerge. Truth that exposed perjured witnesses who had sworn away a young man’s freedom, and police who had bent the law to find the evidence they wanted to find and to conceal that which might prove inconvenient. The law, which had acted with such speed and force to imprison Marshall, slowly ground on its way to set him free — but nothing could give back the eleven lost years which had turned the youth into a hardened con with a reliance on drugs; and the compensation for all he had suffered, had fought for, was a miserable $270,000.

This account of one of the ugliest blots on the history of the Canadian judicial system is both chilling and absorbing. It should serve as a warning that what many Canadians would prefer to believe impossible can happen only too easily.