The 1997 RDS case is Canada’s most momentous race case. For the
first time, the Supreme Court of Canada considered a complaint of
judicial racial bias. Ironically, the judge in question was Corrine
Sparks, the country’s first Black female judge. Reckoning with
Racism considers the RDS case, in which Judge Sparks was accused of
bias against whites. A white Halifax police officer had arrested a
Black teenager, placed him in a choke hold, and charged him with
assaulting an officer and obstructing arrest. In acquitting the teen,
Sparks remarked that police sometimes overreacted when dealing with
non-white youth. The acquittal held, but most of the white appeal
judges critiqued her comments, based on time-honoured traditions that
assumed the legal system was non-racist unless demonstrably proven
otherwise. That became a matter of wide debate as anti-racist
advocates sought to unmask the presumption of white judicial
objectivity. After centuries of racial inequities within policing and
the courts, RDS made the issue impossible to ignore. This book
assesses the case, the arrest that precipitated it, the people who
took it to court, the excitement surrounding it, the dramatic effects
on those involved, and the significance for the Canadian legal system.
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Police, Judges, and the RDS Case
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780774868280
Publisert
2022
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
University of British Columbia Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter