Judging hate

>> Anti-racist activists argue that case should be treated as hate crime

by PATRICK LEJTENYI,
photo by JASON FELKER

Justice tends to move slowly, but when it's at a snail's pace, some people have less patience than others. Following the beating death of 39-year-old Christian Thomas outside a St-Michel bar on June 24, 2000, Sacha Montreuil, reputedly an associate of neo-Nazi skinhead group the Berserkr Boot Boys, was sentenced to six years and five months for second-degree murder. That was in May. But the cases against Adam Guerbuez, 25, and Frédéric Morin, 23, who were alleged to have taken part in the attack but who will be tried separately, have been held over until January and February respectively. A typical delay, say anti-racist activists, who are hoping for swift and effective justice and who say this is the latest grievance in a string of frustrations.

"They're not putting enough emphasis on this being a racially-motivated crime," says "Jane," a member of Anti-Racist Action (ARA), using an alias. "They're not charging it as a hate crime."

The question arises, however, why should they? Thomas was a white, non-political francophone--hardly the usual target for rampaging gangs of white supremacist thugs. The police arrested three men in connection to the murder, but, according to MUCPD communications officer Luc Bellehumeur, "We treat it as an assault and second-degree murder. There is no discrimination here, whether someone is Asian or black or anglophone or homosexual. It's not up to us to determine whether it is a hate crime or not."

Which has done little to endear the police or the justice system to the activists. The very fact that the accused are members of a hate group, they say, is enough to make this a hate crime.

"We know these individuals' backgrounds, we know their criminal history," Jane says. "We know one of the witnesses has a tattoo of a swastika on his skull."

But that simply isn't the way the justice system works. Bellehumeur says the charges are designed to fit the crime, and how the courts deal with it is up to the courts.

Fo Niemi, the director of the Centre for Research Action on Race Relations (CRARR), has seen some improvements in the way police and the courts are handling race-related crimes, especially in the recent judgement against the murderers of a 16-year-old Latina on the north shore of Montreal. But he still thinks that hate crimes have a long way to go before they are given the attention they deserve.

"The problem is," Niemi says, "the Montreal police department has a hate-crime policy on paper, but no infrastructure on how to collect data, how to get victim impact statements, when to recognize a hate crime and when not to. The problem is we don't have a very effective hate-crime system."

Section 718.2 of the Criminal Code states that sentencing should take into account whether the crime was motivated by hate based on race, origin, colour, sexual orientation or any other kind of bias. Nothing is said on political beliefs, which is thought to have been the factor that resulted in Thomas's death. "If there are no grounds involved here [of race-based hate crime] but it is a case of political conviction, this could raise some interesting questions," Niemi says. "It would be interesting to see how that section of the Criminal Code is applied by the courts." :