He said, they said: inside the trial of Matthew McKnight

“By the morning of the third day, Juliette was starting to worry. It was the middle of January, 2020, a viciously cold week in Edmonton. She’d been so sure the jury believed her, believed them. But after 26 hours of deliberation, she wasn’t as certain as she had been, and now the question hung on her like a stone: What was taking so long? The others were waiting, too.”

Jana G. Pruden – The Globe and Mail – July 2020

Prison Unionism

“When the Conservative provincial government announced the closure of the Dauphin jail in early 2020, which employs about 80 people in the small city about three-and-a-half hours northwest of Winnipeg, the union doubled down on incarceration, mobilizing fears of job loss and rural divestment to gather thousands of petition signatures and stage rallies in both Winnipeg and Dauphin opposing the proposed closure.”

Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land, James Wilt – Briarpatch – July 2020

Serenity: A life cut short

“While at the detachment, records say, the young mother, her left eye purple and swollen, told victims’ services staff she couldn’t afford diapers or formula for her seven-month-old daughter, and was afraid to go home. The report she filed triggered a chain reaction, and soon a social worker from Child and Family Services (CFS) set up a meeting to go see the Indigenous mother and baby. The notes from that meeting on Jan. 10, 2011, show that the conversation between social worker and mother was a negotiation.”

Paige Parsons – CBC Edmonton – June 2020

Hitchhiker, hero, celebrity, killer

“It was late in the morning on Feb. 1, 2013, when Caleb Lawrence McGillivary met Jesus Christ on a highway outside Bakersfield. McGillivary had been on the road a good while by then, having left his home in Alberta as a teenager to find his own way in the world. He’d gone back at times, back to his family, back to school or work, but that kind of routine never suited him for long, and by the early months of 2013, he was drifting once again. Not homeless, he would tell people. Home free.”

Jana G. Pruden – The Globe and Mail – June 2020

 

 

 

Elliot, an alcoholic, asked his parole officer for help. She sent him back to prison

“Elliot Hudson found the box on his first afternoon home from prison. He’d gone up to his old bedroom in his parents’ Ottawa house to unpack some of the clothes his father tidied away while Elliot had been incarcerated. He pulled out the old crock-pot box with ‘recovery stuff’ Sharpied on the side. Inside there were maybe six or seven leather-bound journals, dating back to 2012. Elliot, a contemplative 37-year-old man with an occasionally destructive tendency to get trapped in his own mind, couldn’t resist flipping through. It was disheartening. The dates scrawled in the corners changed but the story didn’t.”

 

Jane Gerster – Global News – February 2020

How One Woman Reimagined Justice for Her Rapist

“Early in 2018, in an Ontario courtroom, Marlee Liss faced the man who had raped her. It was the second time she had ever seen him; the first was the night they met, eighteen months earlier. Now, she was at a preliminary hearing, where a judge would decide whether the case had enough evidence to warrant a trial. For five hours, Liss answered questions from the stand: What text messages and voicemails had she exchanged with her friends that night, and why? Why had she entered the man’s apartment? How had he touched her, exactly, and where?”

 

Viviane Fairbank – The Walrus – February 2020

In the GTA’s tow-truck turf wars, the race for profit leads to road rage, violence and intimidation

“For more than a year, a violent tow truck war has been raging across the Greater Toronto Area, erupting in fist fights at crash scenes and trucks being driven off the road as operators compete for bigger slices of the lucrative business. Dozens of trucks have been set on fire, and at least two men tied to the industry have been killed – one as he stood in front of his mother’s Scarborough home. The feuding shows no signs of abating, with at least two arsons reported in York Region during the first week of February alone.”

 

Molly Hayes – The Globe and Mail – February 2020

Elderly, Confused, and Under Arrest

“When Karen Murphy learned her father had dementia, she did everything she could. She went to the Alzheimer Society for advice. She wrote out his medications on a card and stuck it on her parents’ fridge. She paid a visit to the local police department in Sarnia, where he lived, and added his name to a list of the vulnerable—even gave them his photo and asked them to remember that, if he ever became violent, it was the disease talking and not the man. He’d been a mailman, the type to stop and chat, the type to hand out candies at the stores where he delivered. He was a gentle, lovable, huggable man and had never hit anyone, let alone his wife or his kids. But the day he raised his hand against his wife, it was as though he didn’t know who he was.”

 

Alison Motluk – The Local – October 2019

He Stole Their Hearts, Then Their Money

“They started to plan their life together. Dre would have to go back to Vietnam to get his money, much of which, he explained, was in gold bars. They would go together, he said—sort of like a honeymoon. First, though, he was going to take a job delivering water to oil rigs in Edmonton. It would just be a few weeks, and the money was great, he told Jodi. Then he asked if he could borrow $500, so he could pay for the recertification required to take the job. Jodi wasn’t totally comfortable with the idea, but Dre had a story about how he couldn’t access his own funds and he promised to pay her back. A single gold bar was worth three times that much, and he had dozens. ‘I’m doing this for our future,’ he said. And at the time, she believed him.”

Courtney Shea – Chatelaine – January 2020

A Glimpse Inside: A Day at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary

“The reality inside is: plastic baggies covered in feces, and slip and falls suspected to be otherwise—severe enough to require hospitalization. There’s head shots, pools of blood from self-inflicted cuts spotted on CCTV, and towels used to staunch wounds only to be rinsed in the shower by a CO and applied to a body again in the hopes of saving a life.”

Ashley Fitzpatrick – The Independent – January 2020