Notes

Injustice didn’t start in Sydney, Nova Scotia for Donald Marshall Jr., but when he was born as a First Nation Indian. The Marshall family lives in Membertou Street, a street named after Grand Chief Membertou who was the first Mi’kmaq to be baptized and converted into the Catholic religion. He was the eldest of the thirteen children of Caroline and Donald Marshall Sr., the Grand Chief of their reserve. The Marshall family lacks resources and because of this young Donald had to help his father with his work; in addition to this he also doesn’t smoke nor drink as a teenager. A seventeen year old, Donald Marshall Jr. walked through Wentworth Park in downtown Sydney, he ran over an acquaintance, an athletic young man named Sandy Seale who is from a Black family. Two drunk men approached them and asked for a drink but Marshall and Seale refused. Roy Ebsary, a captain, then stabbed Seale with an airborne knife and ran away with his companion, James MacNeil. Marshall received a wound on his left arm from trying to defend his friend, he then ran to ask for help from what happened. He went to the police and reported the murder of Sandy Seale, Donald tried to help the police with the investigation by describing the two men as priests but they would just ignore him. The police then came up of two theories about the murderer, the first theory was that Donald was covering up for someone else, and the second theory was that Donald Marshall Jr. is Seale’s killer. There were three teenagers whom the police interrogated but all of them have different answers because of this, the police forced and threatened the teenagers to somehow believe their second theory instead. The first trial is based on ‘eye witnesses’, the three teenagers were forced to tell a story that they saw Marshall stab Seale that night. Two of the three teenagers told the truth in the court room but unfortunately failed. RCMP officers had pressured Marshall to ‘confess’ to attempting to rob Ebsary and MacNeil, the judge commented that Marshall’s wrongful conviction had been ‘his own fault’ and that his wound was self inflicted. The Sergeant of Detectives who headed the initial investigation into Seale’s death decided Marshall was the prime suspect, despite a lack of evidence, because ‘he shared what [the Commission believed] was a general sense in Sydney’s White community at the time that Indians were not ‘worth’ as much as Whites’. The tension between the Commission’s seeming indifference to questions of racism during the inquiry –extending to its deeming the questioning of witnesses on their views about Aboriginal people ‘irrelevant’ – and the breadth of its recommendations, reflects a similar tension in Canadian society. It is important to point out that when we looked at investigations, we did not consider the merits of the matter themselves, but simply how the justice system responded to them and what factors influenced the various decisions that were made.

On June 4, 1971, Marshall was convicted of the murder of Sandy Seales. The Marshall family were given death threats but despite of it they still believed their son’s innocence and tried everything to get their son out of prison. They also looked for a lawyer who would willingly help them, but because of their lack of money they couldn’t find a good lawyer to defend for Donald. MacNeil confessed to the police that Roy Ebsary was the real murderer but the police didn’t believe him and commented that he’s an alcoholic who just imagined it. Roy Ebsary was then put up in a lie detector test but surprisingly passed it. Roy Ebsary once told a friend a story about him killing an Indian man at the park a long time ago, but his friend didn’t believe him because he thought he was drunk. After eleven years, Ebsary’s daughter told the police that she saw his father cleaning blood from a knife, the night that Seale died. The police then opened the Marshall case and found out that Roy Ebsary had a collection of knives, the match of fiber from Ebsary’s knife and Seale’s jacket means that Ebsary is Seale’s murderer. In 1982, after eleven years in prison, Donald was finally released because of right and sufficient evidence of the case. Roy Ebsary had a year of prison pension while Donald Marshall Jr. had a lifetime pension to a murder he did not commit. Aboriginal defendants are sentenced to longer terms, less likely to be granted parole, and more likely to have parole revoked for minor problems. The Royal Commission on the Donald Marshall Jr., Prosecution was not established, however, just to determine whether one individual was the victim of a miscarriage of justice, or even to get to the bottom of how and why that miscarriage occurred. The final report in the royal commission contains facts and recommendation to help prevent cases like the Marshall case from happening again in the future. The Royal Commission helped us to improve ourselves to be sensitive to the things happening around us. If Marshall isn’t Mi’kmaq, these cases wouldn’t have happened, the story might have gone differently, and he wouldn’t spend eleven years of his innocent teenage life in prison. Most people do believe that racism exist, but only a few people stand up for it. We should all work together to prevent cases similar to the Marshall case, where everyone, not just Aboriginal Canadians, but anyone can be wrongfully convicted.