The R.D.S. case is one of Canada's most significant race cases. It marked the first time in the 122-year history of the Supreme Court that Canada’s top judges had been asked to adjudicate a complaint of racial bias against a judge. Professor Constance Backhouse has earned an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to undertake a full-scale assessment of the R.D.S. case and its significance for the Canadian legal system.
If, prior to 1997, Canadians had been content to believe that the judiciary exhibited no overt signs of racial bias, the R.D.S. case and its journey to the Supreme Court of Canada shattered that complacency. The case concerned a Black teenager, R.D.S., who had been arrested by a white Halifax police officer and charged with assaulting an officer and obstructing arrest. At the subsequent trial, Justice Corrine Sparks, the nation’s first Black female judge, concluded that the prosecution had not proven its case and remarked on the pattern of police overreaction when dealing with non-white youth. The teenager was acquitted, the acquittal was then upheld through three appellate proceedings and finally by the Supreme Court. But Justice Sparks was critiqued by five of the nine Supreme Court judges for her comments on race. This sparked a national conversation, with anti-racist advocates disputing the concept of race neutrality and seeking to unmask the presumption of white judicial objectivity.
In the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, the way the R.D.S. case upended long-held silences about anti-Black racism and forced police, lawyers, judges, academics, the media, and the wider society to debate racism has never been more timely or more worthy of exploration. Professor Backhouse will use her Insight grant to fund a project entitled “A Supreme Controversy: Anti-Black Racism, Judicial Bias, and the R.D.S. Case.” This research will contribute to a book-length case narrative, written for a wide general audience, analyzing the wider context of historical anti-Black racism in Nova Scotia, and evidence of its impact upon policing, the criminal justice system, and the political, economic, social, and legal environments that infused the outcome. This research will help us appreciate the historical underpinnings so evident in this case, enabling Canadians to more accurately comprehend the present and chart the future.
SSHRC Insight Grants support research excellence in the social sciences and humanities. The goal of the Insight program is to build knowledge and understanding about people, societies and the world.
Congratulations to Professor Backhouse on this grant success!