Colten Boushie's mother Debbie Baptiste, left, shown with lawyers Eleanore Sunchild, right, and Michael Seed (standing) at Sunchild Law office at Poundmaker II on Wednesday. (Angela Brown/battlefordsNOW staff) 

By Angela Brown

Hoping for justice

Boushie family’s lawyers hope to see law abolishing peremptory challenges remain

Oct 7, 2020 | 5:07 PM

Colten Boushie’s mother, Debbie Baptiste, doesn’t want to see the clock turn back on progress in justice.

She is opposed to a proposal at the Supreme Court of Canada underway in Ottawa to potentially appeal legislation under Bill C-75 that eliminates peremptory challenges in the selection of jurors.

Baptiste made representations through her legal team of Eleanore Sunchild and Chris Murphy at the Supreme Court of Canada Wednesday – as an intervenor in the matter of R v Chouhan, that is testing Bill C-75’s elimination of peremptory challenges.

In the R v Chouhan case, the constitutionality of Bill C-75 which eliminated peremptory challenges from the jury selection process in the Canadian justice system is being questioned.

Sunchild said Baptiste, and the family of the late Colten Boushie, previously succeeded in lobbying for the elimination of peremptory challenges following the acquittal in 2018 by an all-white jury of Gerald Stanley. Stanley is the man who shot and killed Colten Boushie on his rural property in Saskatchewan in August, 2016.

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“The use of peremptory challenges in the case against Gerald Stanley was another example of a system designed to exclude Indigenous people, and potentially capitalize on existing racist sentiment to craft a more favourable jury. The use of peremptory challenges in this way meant that for Ms. Baptiste and other Indigenous people, the verdict could not be perceived as fair because the jury was not selected in a fair way,” Sunchild said in a statement.

Murphy was present during the proceedings on behalf of Baptiste to argue that peremptory challenges were used to discriminate against Indigenous jurors who, without justification, were removed from the jury by Stanley’s defence counsel.

Sunchild, said peremptory challenges in the jury selection for the Stanley trial resulted in a jury without any apparent representation from Indigenous people.

“Presumably in the Stanley case the Indigenous jurors were all eliminated based on race,” she said. “So that shouldn’t be allowed.”

“I don’t think that any practice that is based on discrimination should be allowed to continue in the Canadian criminal justice system,” Sunchild said.

She questioned a jury makeup that did not appear to reflect a community with a significant Indigenous population.

Sunchild said the Boushie family continues to call for a public inquiry and, or a Royal Commission, to investigate the systemic racism that exists within the Canadian Justice System.

For Baptiste, she said progress was made by abolishing the practice of peremptory challenges in jury selection, and she would not want to see it lost.

“I have hope for the future for the next generation – for the families that have to go up to systemic racism in the justice system – that they have hope [when they] go into the courtroom that some changes are being made,” she said. “We should have the freedom, the right to have the jury selected based on fairness.”

Baptiste said the justice system needs to continue to make changes that are “truly needed.”

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angela.brown@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @battlefordsNOW