TORONTO – I am wearing a suit, and the security officers at the Jane-Finch courthouse wave me past the queue of young men in jeans, camouflage, and bandanas. I pause when my keys set off the metal detector, but the guards don't even glance at me. Two of them are busy emptying a young woman's purse onto the security counter—she is wearing a multitude of rings and a candy-pink jacket. I set off to find the judges' chambers.
The courthouse is filled with nervous energy. Some people sit silently and fidget, waiting for the courtrooms to open. Others speak tensely with their families or their lawyers. Some of the young men sitting outside the youth courts, those in khakis and shirtsleeves, try to look cool and comfortable but are betrayed by a trembling hand or a slight list toward a nearby parent. Others, unaccompanied and dressed mostly in destroyed street clothes, manage to look genuinely unconcerned.
This is my first day. I am a student at Osgoode Hall Law School, enrolled in its “intensive” program in criminal law and sent to witness the statutes, regulations, and case law I've studied for the past three years put into action. “The law is a human business,” my instructors have told me again and again. I am here, in the courthouse of the most crime-ridden district in Toronto, to see the human side of it.
Despite its unofficial name, the Jane-Finch courthouse is actually several blocks west of the notorious intersection. Court staff follow the lawyers' habit of calling courthouses by their street number and refer to the building as “2201.” I never hear anyone at the courthouse call it “Jane-Finch”; elsewhere, I never hear anyone call it anything but. It’s the first stop for most people accused of committing a crime in Toronto’s northwestern Etobicoke region, and it shares responsibility for 31 Division, a police district covering more than 40 square kilometres. It was home to most of the gun violence that prompted the media here to dub 2005 the Year of the Gun.
Once I've arrived and met the judges, one of them asks me to walk with him as he tells me about the courthouse. I follow him through an unfamiliar hallway, step through a door as I hear a voice say “All rise,” and freeze as I realize I am standing behind the bench, below the royal seal of Canada, facing a courtroom full of people on their feet. I feel dislocated, as though a curtain has gone up and I've been caught on a stage. The judge has taken his seat and is facing away from me. I can't tell if this is a prank or if he just doesn't care. I scuttle past the lawyers at the counsel table and sheepishly take a seat in the gallery to watch as the first case is called.
One of my assumptions that doesn't survive the first day is that accused people dress up for court. Defendants saunter to the bar in ripped jeans, hoodies, and baseball caps. They stick chewing gum to the polished wood of the gallery benches. They drop sports bags on the floor and drape themselves over three seats, a few metres from lawyers who bow each time the judge stands, court officers in full uniform, and court clerks in black gowns and white cravats.
This is my first surprise, and it is only reinforced as days pass. For the past three years I've heard that the goals of the courts include generating “respect for the process” and “public confidence in the administration of justice.” One hour at the Jane-Finch courthouse shows that most of the public here has nothing but disdain for this process.
The longer I’m here, the less I can blame them. The courthouse is in their neighbourhood, but the entire system is run by people who might as well be from Mars. Lawyers arrive in sedans and leave as soon as their cases are heard. Judges enter and leave the courthouse by a separate entrance. The defendants who aren't in jail take the bus or walk. They don't live far.
Criminal law's dirtiest secret is that for people whose neighbourhoods are saturated with gangs and violence have no reason to respect the law—the only reason to behave is that the police are the biggest gang with the most guns. The courts try hard to instill real respect, but their attempts are often artificial: at Jane-Finch, a private corridor allows the judges to get to their courtrooms without walking the public halls—but they share it with prisoners being brought from the holding cells to the prisoner's dock (“In case you ever needed proof that law is theatre,” one of the judges says).
Other measures are more genuine. Victim/witness workers expertly guide their charges through the more bewildering and impersonal parts of the system. Court translators are available for those who need them; in the space of two months I see court translators whispering into the ears of defendants in Mandarin, Tamil, Hindi, Spanish, Punjabi, and Vietnamese. Witnesses asked to swear they will tell the truth may choose to place a hand on the Bible, the Koran, or the Bhagavad-Gita.
My second shock is over the flexibility of the law itself. As a law student, I am accustomed to poring over old cases for hours and writing papers that agonize over the interpretation of the simplest of phrases. I begin to realize my naïveté the fourth or fifth time I see a judge hand down a decision without reference to any of the rules I have memorized. The black robes and private corridors make it easy to imagine judges as faceless automata blindly following any precedent cited by the lawyers. But as I sit in their courtrooms and hear their private concerns before and after each case, I gradually begin to perceive a group of men and women struggling daily with the responsibility of making decisions of staggering importance about people they've never met.
This shock is not so bad as the first. I begin to see the value of this human dimension when, in my second month at Jane-Finch, I witness the case of a man who enters the prisoner's dock from the courthouse cells. He is here to plead guilty to breaching a no-contact order with his estranged wife by harassing her and their children. He is an older man, unshaven and wearing the same clothes he was in when the police arrested him on the doorstep of what was once his home.
On the bench is Justice George Gage, a middle-aged man with an unhurried, detached manner. I had occasionally found myself in his court wondering if he were listening, only to have him direct a razor-sharp question at a witness or lawyer seconds later.
He listens to the Crown and the man's defence lawyer argue over the proper punishment. Then he turns to the prisoner.
“Sir,” he says gently, looking directly at the man for the first time through the thick safety glass of the prisoner’s dock, “it's time to let go.”
The man deflates. He closes his eyes and nods his head, raising his shackled hands to his face.
As the lawyers sit in silence, Justice Gage delivers his judgment directly to the guilty man, expressing sorrow over the breakdown of the man's marriage, confidence that he is capable of moving on with his own life, and the necessity of allowing his wife to do the same.
“Your lawyer tells me that your children still wish to have contact with you,” he says. “This is a positive thing. Do not mess that up.”
He tightens the conditions designed to keep the man away from his wife but encourages him to maintain contact with his children. He requires him to seek counselling so that he can begin to rebuild his life. Through the letter of the law, the gulf between the bench and the prisoner’s dock, and all the contrived formality of the Jane-Finch courthouse, Gage carefully creates a connection between two human beings. When he has finished, the sentence is less a punishment than a statement of empathy, of understanding, and of hope.
Matthew Oleynik is a student-at-law at the Crown Law Office in Toronto. His views are his own.