Lives, stolen

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/07/2023 (844 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

So, if you’re old enough, what were you doing 50 years ago today?

Maybe you were only in grade school — or maybe graduating from high school, with your whole life ahead of you. Maybe you were 18 or 19, fit and limber, college-bound or starting your very first full-time job.

It would have been 1973, after all, when the three top Billboard singles were Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree, Bad, Bad Leroy Brown and Roberta Flack’s Killing Me Softly With His Song. Biggest movie? The Exorcist.

Maybe you weren’t even born yet in 1973, so what we’re actually talking about here is a period of time that would encompass more than your entire life so far.

And what are we talking about?

Stolen lives.

In 1973, someone murdered Winnipeg chef Ting Fong Chan. That’s the first stolen life, and one that shouldn’t be forgotten.

But that was just the beginning. The justice system and the Winnipeg police were going to steal more lives.

Four men were charged in relation to his murder. Allan John (A.J.) Woodhouse, who was 17, Brian Anderson, 18, Clarence Woodhouse and Russell Woodhouse. All were Indigenous. They were convicted by an all-male white jury.

(Russell Woodhouse has since died — Clarence’s whereabouts are unknown.)

What’s abundantly clear now — after 50 long years — is that Allan Woodhouse and Brian Anderson were falsely accused, and then convicted on the basis of coerced and falsified confessions.

A miscarriage of justice is an awfully sterile way of describing what happened to them.

Allan Woodhouse served 23 years in prison, and was released on full parole in 1990. Anderson spent 10 years in jail, getting full parole in 1983.

Throughout, they maintained their innocence.

This past week, they were officially found to be innocent of the charges.

“You are innocent. You deserve acquittals,” Court of King’s Bench Chief Justice Glenn Joyal said on Tuesday. “Your stories are stories of courage and resilience… You are heroes in every sense of the word.”

Fine words — overdue words. But also, cold comfort, given all that the two men have endured. And they are not alone: the lawyers who worked for the two men say there are others like them, still carrying the burden of false charges. It’s an intolerable situation.

Now go back for a moment to thinking about what you were doing if you were alive in 1973. And think about what it would be like if it had been you, instead of Anderson and Woodhouse.

You wouldn’t be taking a girl you were dating to see The Exorcist. You wouldn’t be slow-dancing with a new boyfriend to Killing Me Softly With His Song.

Then start thinking about how those false convictions would have changed every aspect of your life, even after prison. Think about that cloud hanging over every single thing you tried to do: over every job application, every introduction to a prospective partner’s parents, over every attempt to get a car loan or a mortgage.

And then imagine that the reason you were picked out for such punishment in the first place had nothing at all to do with you, and was something as simple as the fact that you were one of a group of Indigenous men.

The 1974 convictions have stolen close to an entire lifetime from Woodhouse and Anderson.

Think about being 17 years old and having every single hope and dream you had — every piece of your future — being snatched away by a coldly calculated, structured and deliberate lie.

A lie formulated by the people whose job it was to uphold justice, not to callously manipulate it.

If you can imagine that, then maybe, maybe you will sense a small piece of the horror involved.

You still haven’t lived it.