Real Justice: Convicted for Being Mi’kmaq, The Story of Donald Marshall Jr. by Bill Swan.

This Real Justice book is the second by author Bill Swan in a series of nonfiction stories about Canadian teens who were wrongfully convicted of serious crimes and only exonerated after many years of incarceration. Swan’s first book in the series was about the case of Stephen Truscott, a high-profile murder conviction in which the convicted fourteen year old, Truscott, was exonerated after forty plus years in prison.

Donald Marshall Jr. was convicted of killing his friend/acquaintance Sandy Seale in 1971 and sentenced to life in prison in Nova Scotia, Canada. Donald Marshall Jr. was of Native American (Mi’kmaq) extraction, and his alleged victim was black, or “African Canadian” or “racialized”, as the book calls him. The author takes a statement from the Royal Commission that studied the case and makes it the centerpiece of his story:

“Donald Marshall Jr. was convicted and sent to prison, in part at least, because he was a Native person.”

Mr. Swan effectively ignores the “in part” part of that statement, and tells the entire story of Sandy Seale’s murder as if Mr. Marshall were completely trustworthy and totally innocent, while acknowledging that Marshall was in trouble with the law and had an explosive temper and lied, both before and after the alleged crime took place. I’m not denying that a dreadful miscarriage of justice happened and that Donald Marshall Jr. was unjustly imprisoned for a crime that he did not commit. However, the author’s attempts to make Marshall into an innocent victim of racial bias, and even a hero for his supposed “courage” and “integrity,” fall flat.

The book calls Donald Marshall’s story “deeply troubling” and says that “conviction for a crime he did not commit scarred him for life.” Maybe. But this book did not convince me that Marshall was a hero–just a sad victim in a sordid case. I never got a sense of who Donald Marshall was —just a sense that he wasn’t the one who murdered Sandy Seale.

I received a review copy of Real Justice: Convicted for Being Mi’kmaq from NetGalley.

There is an adult nonfiction book about the Donald Marshall case: Justice Denied The Law Versus Donald Marshall by Michael Harris, and the book inspired a movie, also called Justice Denied.