Christie Blatchford - Life Sentence: Stories from Four Decades of Court Reporting--or, How I Fell Out of Love with the Canadian Justice System (Especially Judges)

O N A BREAK one recent day in coroners court, while covering an inquest, I asked the coroners counsel (these are Ontario prosecutors on loan to the coroners office) for the third or fourth time about getting a copy of an exhibit.

It was only a transcript of the most significant piece of evidence in the entire inquest, a haunting 911 call made by three teenagers who were trapped in a raging house fire and whose desperate last words were caught on the recording.

The coroner by now had already made it pretty clear, though hed not yet issued a ruling, that journalists werent going to get copies of the actual call, and the lawyer for the families of the dead teenagers was already marshalling her arguments against the release of the tape (and indeed, several parents later testified in a brief proceeding held in the absence of the jury, with one agonized father saying, correctly, that the kids were dying on the phone).

If that werent enough, there was the fact that even in this spanking-new, one-billion-dollar Forensic Services and Coroners Complex building, it was SNAFU , or situation normal all fucked up.

The microphones either worked badly or no one knew properly how to speak into them, and witnesses mumbled, with the result that at a proceeding whose singular purpose was to focus public attention and scrutiny onto the death of a community member, the public was neither welcomed nor, often, able to hear what was being said.

But by now, the inquest was into its sixth day, and though I wasnt there for the first week, I figured the powers that be might have managed to at least rouse themselves to get the transcript ready.

Theres a whole series of cases, from the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Dagenais v Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1994 on down, which hold that the rights of the press arent trifling and are protected as a paramount value by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. These decisions apply not just to courts but to quasi-judicial proceedings such as inquests.

In my growing rage at not having a decision on the transcript, let alone the transcript, I dared remind coroners counsel of the public nature of the proceeding and the rights of the press.

In my fury, I threw the wrong case at himRegina v Stinchcombe, which was about evidence disclosure.

A smile of truly exquisite smugness crossed the lawyers face.

He whispered to someone beside him; I heard the word Dagenais and immediately knew Id grabbed the wrong case from the recesses of my cluttered head.

Indeed, he turned around to correct me, with unsettling serenity. Its not Stinchcombe, he said. Its Dagenais.

In those few minutes was illustrated so much that is enraging about the broader justice system: Its collective overweening self-satisfaction; its increasing deference to the victim and the daily broadening of who qualifies for that status (one of the first responders to the fire wept on the stand, a dispatcher was refusing to testify because of her post-traumatic stress disorder, which nonetheless hadnt precluded her from working overtime on a recent holiday weekend, and another lawyer asked for an early break because of her vertigo); and its disdain for anyone not legally trainedthat is, the general public and the publics profoundly flawed representative, the press.

At some points, writing this reporters-eye-view of the justice system, I was tempted to call it Contempt of Courttheirs for the likes of me and mine for the likes of them.

But while I suspect theirs may be a permanent condition, mine is not. My contempt waxes and wanes, depending on the merits of the case, the judge, the lawyers and the state of my own knowledge.

At their very best, what the criminal courts and the justice systems main players care most about is fairness, the presumption of innocence, and reason, not heat.

Despite glorious years spent as a tabloid journalist, and despite a plea from a friend who at my request read a chapter and then begged me for a nice clean beheading, by which he meant a harsh but simple critique of the system, I am, after thirty-eight years, incapable of seeing it in black and white.

I dont want to be a lawyer.

I dont want to sound like a lawyer.

But I wouldnt mind being as fair as one. Thats what Ive aimed for in this book.