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Race, pain, and Sammy Yatim
May. 23rd, 2016 02:22 pmI've been meaning to write a post for awhile on the bizarre sentencing arguments following the equally bizarre conviction of James Forcillo, the pig that murdered a mentally ill teenager on a Toronto streetcar, and the horrible miscarriage of justice in the Freddie Gray murder just reminded me to do so.
Forcillo, you may recall, was charged with attempted murder even though Sammy Yatim died after Forcillo shot him eight times. The weird argument here is that he was legitimately firing in self defence the first time (note that Yatim was alone, wielding a small knife, and Forcillo could have, I dunno, gotten off the otherwise empty streetcar and just waited him out, but why do that when you can gun down a kid, right?), which was when the fatal shots were fired, but the second round was gratuitious. That's dumb as shit, but thanks to the reactionary minimum sentencing laws brought in by various governments starting with Chretien's in 1995, Forcillo is looking at at least five years in prison.
Except! The defence would really like the judge to make a special exception for the rules just for him, because cops are special and get paid over $100,000 a year without having to pay for post-secondary education and get to carry guns and shoot whoever they want. So they've made a series of increasingly Dadaist arguments, including that mandatory minimum sentences were never supposed to apply to cops, and that the sentence could deter domestic violence victims from fighting back against their abusers. In fact, the defence wants house arrest, which is quaint, given that pot dealers who've never hurt anyone in their lives end up in jail all the time. It's almost like jails are unpleasant places where we should be reluctant to send people, or something.
But the most absurd, and most horrible argument for leniency in Forcillo's case is that because Yatim was paralyzed from the first volley of bullets, the second round of shooting, for which Forcillo was convicted, didn't actually hurt him any. As the judge points out, this kind of opens the door to the possibility that it's cool to go around shooting parapalegics in the legs because they can't feel it. But still, this was an actual argument heard in court and the lawyer wasn't immediately disbarred or forced to wear a dunce cap or anything like that.
As far as I can tell, no one has publicly called this argument what it is, which is a prime example of the racial empathy gap. That's one of those things that Canadians (if they've heard of it) think only applies to black people in the US, but examine the rhetoric around how "threatened" Forcillo, a large thug with a gun, felt by Yatim, a skinny teenager, and you can pretty much play racial empathy bingo. Yatim was twice marginalized, as a person of colour and a person with mental illness. Racism in Canada isn't the gaping, bleeding wound it is in the US; here, it's a slow-burning infection, but no less fatal.
We know that the racial empathy gap is real. We know it was a justification for slavery, the association of racialized bodies with mindless animals, less sensitive to pain because they were already hardened to it. We know that it's still a horror in the modern era, with medical professionals unwilling to prescribe as much pain medication to black patients. And it's a factor here, where Yatim's life, his physical and mental suffering in his last moments of life, is given less weight than that of someone with a white body, a white mind.
Forcillo, too, is facing special treatment; that there is even an argument for the courts not tossing him in jail for at least five years (the Crown is asking for 8-10) is a factor of his white skin and his blue uniform. In fact, he is still getting paid $103,967 a year, and will be until he's actually sentenced. There is a fair bit of chatter about that, and rightly so.
I typically don't believe in mandatory minimum sentencing (in fact, I'm broadly against prisons as a whole) but this is the one case where I think it absolutely makes sense, to avoid the sort of bias against victims with skin colours like Sammy Yatim and towards criminals with skin colours like James Forcillo's. I'm not convinced a primarily white legal system, which props up a system of white supremacy, is ready to be trusted with nuance in a case where ancient racist tropes can be invoked to cheapen the life of a dead teenager.
Forcillo, you may recall, was charged with attempted murder even though Sammy Yatim died after Forcillo shot him eight times. The weird argument here is that he was legitimately firing in self defence the first time (note that Yatim was alone, wielding a small knife, and Forcillo could have, I dunno, gotten off the otherwise empty streetcar and just waited him out, but why do that when you can gun down a kid, right?), which was when the fatal shots were fired, but the second round was gratuitious. That's dumb as shit, but thanks to the reactionary minimum sentencing laws brought in by various governments starting with Chretien's in 1995, Forcillo is looking at at least five years in prison.
Except! The defence would really like the judge to make a special exception for the rules just for him, because cops are special and get paid over $100,000 a year without having to pay for post-secondary education and get to carry guns and shoot whoever they want. So they've made a series of increasingly Dadaist arguments, including that mandatory minimum sentences were never supposed to apply to cops, and that the sentence could deter domestic violence victims from fighting back against their abusers. In fact, the defence wants house arrest, which is quaint, given that pot dealers who've never hurt anyone in their lives end up in jail all the time. It's almost like jails are unpleasant places where we should be reluctant to send people, or something.
But the most absurd, and most horrible argument for leniency in Forcillo's case is that because Yatim was paralyzed from the first volley of bullets, the second round of shooting, for which Forcillo was convicted, didn't actually hurt him any. As the judge points out, this kind of opens the door to the possibility that it's cool to go around shooting parapalegics in the legs because they can't feel it. But still, this was an actual argument heard in court and the lawyer wasn't immediately disbarred or forced to wear a dunce cap or anything like that.
As far as I can tell, no one has publicly called this argument what it is, which is a prime example of the racial empathy gap. That's one of those things that Canadians (if they've heard of it) think only applies to black people in the US, but examine the rhetoric around how "threatened" Forcillo, a large thug with a gun, felt by Yatim, a skinny teenager, and you can pretty much play racial empathy bingo. Yatim was twice marginalized, as a person of colour and a person with mental illness. Racism in Canada isn't the gaping, bleeding wound it is in the US; here, it's a slow-burning infection, but no less fatal.
We know that the racial empathy gap is real. We know it was a justification for slavery, the association of racialized bodies with mindless animals, less sensitive to pain because they were already hardened to it. We know that it's still a horror in the modern era, with medical professionals unwilling to prescribe as much pain medication to black patients. And it's a factor here, where Yatim's life, his physical and mental suffering in his last moments of life, is given less weight than that of someone with a white body, a white mind.
Forcillo, too, is facing special treatment; that there is even an argument for the courts not tossing him in jail for at least five years (the Crown is asking for 8-10) is a factor of his white skin and his blue uniform. In fact, he is still getting paid $103,967 a year, and will be until he's actually sentenced. There is a fair bit of chatter about that, and rightly so.
I typically don't believe in mandatory minimum sentencing (in fact, I'm broadly against prisons as a whole) but this is the one case where I think it absolutely makes sense, to avoid the sort of bias against victims with skin colours like Sammy Yatim and towards criminals with skin colours like James Forcillo's. I'm not convinced a primarily white legal system, which props up a system of white supremacy, is ready to be trusted with nuance in a case where ancient racist tropes can be invoked to cheapen the life of a dead teenager.
