SCoC: Native man not entitled to aboriginals on jury

[oneh2obabe]

In upholding the manslaughter conviction against a native man in Ontario the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled the province was not required to address systemic problems contributing to the reluctance of aboriginal onreserve residents to participate in the jury process.

The decision, released by the high court Thursday, involved Clifford Kokopenace. He initially faced second-degree murder charges, but a jury in Kenora convicted him in 2008 of manslaughter in the knifing death of Taylor Assin in 2007 on the Grassy Narrows reserve near Kenora.

Before Kokopenace was sentenced his lawyers learned there were issues with the jury pool. The jurors that sat for his trial were selected from Kenora’s 2008 jury roll, a roll consisting of 699 potential jurors, of whom only 29 were First Nation on-reserve residents – 4.1 per cent of the jury roll.

But in that district, First Nation on-reserve residents made up 32 per cent of the adult population. The total population for all adults in the area at the time was 65,000.

The Ontario Court of Appeal would later quash Kokopenace’s conviction and order a second trial. One of the appeal court’s key findings was that Ontario failed to provide aboriginal on-reserve residents with a “fair opportunity” to be included on the jury roll.

But in its ruling Thursday, the Supreme Court found an accused’s representativeness right is “not the appropriate mechanism for repairing the damaged relationship between particular societal groups and our criminal justice system more generally.”

The high court went on to say there is no right to a jury roll of a particular composition, nor to one that proportionately represents all the diverse groups in Canadian society. “Requiring a jury roll to proportionately represent the different religions, races, cultures, or individual characteristics of eligible jurors would create a number of insurmountable problems.’’

Complete article
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015 ... court.html

[FreeRights]

I came here to post this. You beat me to it.

An excellent decision by the Supreme Court.

[Liquidnails]

The supreme court judges are pretty damn good at making the right decision.