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Notes -
The following is only glancingly related to this top-post, but I didn't want to make a top-post itself, and I'm also curious how it relates to Canadian polarization:
I stumbled on this article today about how "special consideration for Indigenous people accused of crime can be extended beyond sentencing into the trials themselves to reduce the effects of discrimination and disadvantage, Ontario’s top court has ruled." The specific case involves an indigenous person who shot and killed someone and the judge during the trial preventing parts (not all) of the defendant's criminal history from being told to jurors. According to the article, the defendant when requesting this made this argument on the basis that "because he was Indigenous and from a deeply disadvantaged background, special considerations should apply to what the jury could be told," which is something with precedent in the Canadian legal system, just not for this specific type of thing. The Ontario Court of Appeal which upheld this decision (the upholding being the actual topic of this article), stated "Trial judges must take notice of the fact that Indigenous people are often the objects of racism outside and inside the criminal justice system" as part of their reasoning.
As an aside, for this specific homicide, based on the description in this article, it seems to me that the acquittal was the correct decision; armed or not, if the person who was killed was running after the killer with clear intent to harm him, then the killer had every right to defend himself with deadly force. There are grey areas that different people can hold different opinions on depending on if the killer started the altercation or the person who was killed did, but it's my personal opinion that that doesn't matter if the killer was running away as described. As such, I don't know that this decision by the judge had impact on the jury's decision.
But more to the point, I'm wondering if anyone is familiar enough with the Canadian criminal justice system to say what, if anything, would be the outcome of this. This seems to give responsibility and a lot of power to judges to determine how to properly counter the racism Indigenous people face all throughout their lives in order to produce a fair process. Which I wouldn't think that judges are particularly qualified to do, but then again, they're judges for a reason, and it looks like it was already their responsibility to begin with; this just expands the scope of it. Is this sort of thing just "baked in" to Canadian politics, and will the various parties in the Canadian CW just not take notice?
And as an American, I'm curious if anyone knows enough of the differences between the American and Canadian legal systems to say the likelihood of this kind of thing being implemented in the US. Clearly the laws and legal history and the constitutions are very different, and currently there is no such explicit instruction to American judges to provide special treatment to individuals on the basis of the history of the demographic groups - but not of those individuals - to which they belong. But the philosophical principles behind the decision clearly exist in both Canada and the US, and certainly we see the exact same type of thing happen all the time in the US in non-criminal contexts (e.g. school admissions). Indigenous people seem to have a special spot in Canadian society in a way that Native Americans in the US don't, but in the US black people have a special spot due to its history with slavery and anti-black racism. Native Americans have various legal carve-outs in US law, but I'm not aware of any for blacks, and I'm not aware of any for anyone when it comes to criminal justice. Is it reasonably likely that, say, 20 years from now, the US criminal justice system will have standards for the judge to treat defendants differently based purely on the defendant's ethnicity/race/etc.? Again, the principles that led to this decision in Canada are about equally popular and powerful in America, so it seems possible if the proponents of those principles have their way, but I'm wondering how any sort of pushback in the American system might differ from the Canadian one.
Basically yes. The courts have been playing a weird game where they say "we never said give natives lower sentences, we just said they need special consideration".
There's just always been a very strong trend where people in large cities think of natives as more like magic wood elves than human beings.
People on the right just view it as a hill not worth dying on. The legal system is filled with urbanites with minimal contact with natives. Their beliefs are strongly held.
There's just so much lower hanging fruit elsewhere.
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