Advertisement

Cindy Gladue-inspired rallies to demand appeal of not guilty murder verdict

**Editor’s note: This article contains graphic descriptions that may be upsetting to some readers.

Cindy Gladue bled to death in a motel bathroom from an 11-centimetre wound in the wall of her vagina.

On March 18th, Brad Barton, the man who was in that motel room with her the night she died, was acquitted of murderand manslaughter.

Barton, a 46-year-old long-haul trucker from Ontario, admitted in court that he was with Gladue that night. He testified that if he caused the injury it was inadvertent, likely the result of rough sex. He fell asleep and woke the next morning to find her dead, the jury heard.

The verdict outraged Gladue’s family and their supporters, who see it as another low point in the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered First Nations women in Canada.

This Thursday, rallies are planned in 14 cities from St. John’s, NL, to Victoria, B.C., to demand an appeal and retrial.

“Cindy’s family, they were so, so hurt by this and in so much pain,” Fawn Marie Lamouche, who was outside the courthouse when the verdict was announced and who is one of the organizers of the Edmonton rally, tells Yahoo Canada News.

“I just felt devastated for the family and I just felt like huge injustice had taken place.”

Lamouche, who is Metis, says she felt compelled to do something.

“To me, this not guilty verdict says no one’s going to care if someone does this to an indigenous woman. The justice system has totally failed the family, has failed Cindy and has failed indigenous women and girls across the country,” she says.

“The community has had enough.”

An online petition demanding Alberta Justice Minister Jonathan Denis appeal the acquittal of trucker Brad Barton has gathered more than 2,000 signatures as of Tuesday morning.

Canada’s missing and murdered aboriginal women

Gladue was one of 1,017 indigenous women murdered in Canada between 1980 and 2012, according to a report released last year by RCMP. Another 164 aboriginal women were missing.

Of course, they are not all women.

Tina Fontaine’s body was found in the Red River in Winnipeg last August. She was 15 years old.

Fontaine’s death, too, renewed demands for a public inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women, who are more than four times more likely to die by violence than their non-indigenous counterparts.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has ruled it out.

"It’s very clear that there has been very fulsome study … of these particular things. They’re not all one phenomenon," Harper said after Fontaine’s body was found stuffed in a bag in the river. "We should not view this as a sociological phenomenon. We should view it as crime."

Canada’s failure to promptly and thoroughly investigate the high levels of violence against aboriginal women is a “grave violation” of rights, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women said in a report issued earlier this month.

“Aboriginal women and girls are more likely to be victims of violence than men or non-aboriginal women, and they are more likely to die as a result. Yet, despite the seriousness of the situation, the Canadian State has not sufficiently implemented measures to ensure that cases of missing and murdered aboriginal women are effectively investigated and prosecuted,” committee members Niklas Bruun and Barbara Bailey say in the report.

The committee has joined Amnesty International Canada, the Native Women’s Association of Canada, the Assembly of First Nations and every other aboriginal organization in the country, as well as provincial and territorial premiers in calling for such an inquiry.