(Content warning: suicide,
violence)
The
last three weeks of 58-year-old single mother and abuse survivor Michele M’s
life were spent on the run from a multi-generational history of male violence
against women and children.
Despite having saved herself and her children nine years ago from
an abusive ex-spouse, Michele was treated as a serious criminal by a Canadian
state that, despite white ribbons and feminist window dressing, refused to
acknowledge and believe the well-established history of abuse she and her
children had suffered.
While it was reported
that Michele took her own life the evening of November 5 at the notorious Leclerc prison, it
would be more accurate to conclude that her life had been stolen from her long
ago by male abusers, police, judges, social services agents, media, and a
system that refuses to believe or understand the reality of male violence
against women. While Michele had tried with the greatest of dignity to win back
piece after piece of her life through the years, she tragically ran out of hope
three weeks after the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear her appeal for a
second time.
A
former U.S. resident, Michele had been sought since 2010 for extradition from
Canada to the state of Georgia to face trial for the alleged crime of
interstate interference with custody.
The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear her case in October was the final
leg of a nine-year legal odyssey that required Michele, as part of her bail
conditions, to turn herself in to custody each time a court was about to
pronounce on her fate.
But
by this fall, Michele had had enough of prison. Since 2010, she’d been
jailed at various times for periods up to six months, and forced to live under
a house arrest regime that kept her cooped up for 23 hours a day in a modest
Lac Megantic apartment.
Rather than
report for custody last month, she went on the run from a forced return to the
state of Georgia where, like every other U.S. jurisdiction, “domestic violence
survivors have been criminalized,
prosecuted, and imprisoned for acts carried out by their abusive partners.
Often, these were actions that they either knew nothing about or were powerless
to stop. But at trial, their experiences of abuse are often downplayed or outright
dismissed.”
In the end, the
RCMP tracked her down and arrested her in Quebec after Michele spent two weeks
resisting surrender to prison. Her life ended four days later.
Breaking the Cycle of
Violence
In 2010, Michele (long known as MM in her court history), while
living in the state of Georgia, had sought to break the cycle of violence plaguing
her life by rescuing herself and her kids (then aged 14, 11 and 9) from an abusive father and fleeing to Quebec
for their collective safety (all were joint U.S.-Canadian citizens). On that
score, she was ultimately successful. She saved their lives. All three children
are now adults, Canadian citizens who, almost a decade ago, were sleeping in an
abandoned Georgia garage to escape their father’s abuse.
Despite doing what any loving parent would do, Michele was sought
for extradition by the United States – at the behest of her vengeful
ex-husband – for alleged interstate interference in child custody. That her
abusive ex-spouse had previously been awarded custody of the children despite
his record of violence was depressingly unsurprising for, as Salon reports, “In family courts throughout the [USA], evidence that one of the parents is
sexually or physically abusing a child is routinely rejected. Instead, perpetrators of abuse are often entrusted with unsupervised
visits or joint or sole custody of the children they abuse, putting children in
danger of serious, often life-threatening harm, according to children’s
advocates.”
Originally arrested by the RCMP 2 days before Christmas, 2010 while
staying in a Quebec women’s shelter, Michele spent the following six months
awaiting bail behind bars, and an additional eight years fighting a case that
should have been dismissed as being without merit long ago.
When asked in a 2011 court hearing why she had gone into a Quebec
women’s shelter upon her arrival north of the border, Michele replied: “Because
I had been beaten by him for the last final time.”
The first year back in
Quebec was difficult, she told me a
few years ago, but “from a jailhouse with zero resources, I pulled from any
place I could to make sure those children were not sent back to their abuser,
and even the children said, ‘we’re not going back, we’ll take foster care
here.’”
Michele’s Final Weeks
This past October, Michele received her customary command to
report to prison to await the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision on whether
they would hear her case. Michele always had to turn herself in to prison
authorities to await the outcome of court deliberations at various stages in
her case, after which she would return on bail to her house arrest. But this
time felt different. From the moment that chilling message to report to jail arrived,
Michele was scrambling to get her affairs in order, to arrange long-term care
for her mother (suffering with Alzheimer’s), and figure out her next move. She
was clear with me that she could not face the humiliation of entering prison
doors anymore in her life. The degrading conditions, the humiliating strip
searches, the incessantly petty violence of prison routine were too much for
her, especially after a traumatizing stay behind bars in the spring awaiting a
decision of the Quebec Court of Appeal
“Why, why, why why, why do
they keep doing this to me?” she would plead with me. “Why isn't HE in jail?”
she asked, referencing the abusive ex-spouse who had repeatedly told the
children that his goal was to see Michele either jailed for life or six feet under.
Much as she feared more jail and more courts, she ultimately feared seeing him
again. Hearing that voice, seeing the rage-filled face, would reopen all the
traumas she tried to overcome through a disposition best described by her
facebook moniker, Sunshine.
I last spoke with Michele
the day before she was discovered without vital signs in her jail cell. She had
been arrested the previous Friday after a frantic two-week journey. She had
refused to report to prison, and an arrest warrant went out for her.
Once on the run, she’d
purchased a burner phone to avoid detection and paid cash for her necessities.
We discussed her limited options, and her dream that the decade-old case – so
old it was packed away in the archives of the Cobb County District Attorney’s office
– would be too much trouble to unpack and revisit. She kept telling me, again
and again, as if doing so would make it true, that she just could not go back
to Georgia.
Having known and worked
with Michele for almost five years, I knew she was strong, inventive, and
determined. She had, after all, saved her children’s lives. When she had been
in jail facing forced removal to Georgia in December 2015 – after the Supreme
Court rejected her first appeal in a narrow 4-3 loss – she went on 12-day hunger
strike as we mobilized a national effort to force reconsideration of her case
by the then new Justice Minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould. Five years to the day
that she’d been arrested in the women’s shelter – December 23, 2015 – we won a
stunning reprieve.
But this time around, four
years later, Michele’s voice was different, as if a fire were slowly going out.
Some days she’d call and ask what I thought about her walking across the border
and taking a bus to Georgia and turning herself in there. There was something so
galling to her about the humiliation of being picked up by U.S. marshalls and
being led away in chains from her birth country of Canada, whose government had
clearly betrayed her.
At times, the calls were
intensely difficult, as she described two separate, unsuccessful suicide
attempts that, she said, proved to her that “God wasn’t ready to take me yet.” Michele
often said that she’d heard and believed a celestial voice speaking to her
while she tried to sleep in her various prison cells. “Don't go back to
Georgia,” the voices were telling her. “You
shouldn't be extradited.”
The Pain of Extradition
I have often worked as a community advocate in cases of
extradition, a stunningly unfair process by which anyone living in Canada can
lose all of their Charter-guaranteed due process rights when a foreign state
issues a request for their arrest and forced removal, no matter how flimsy the
case. In trying to meet the challenge of these impossible cases, I got to know
and work with Michele.
The injustice of her situation was clearly part of a pattern I had
personally witnessed in my own work. I’d seen cases where refugees’ protected
person status in Canada was overturned based on an extradition request by the
country from whose persecution they had fled. There was the case of an African
American man who 35 years earlier had defended himself against a racist and
potentially lethal police attack on the streets of Chicago. Despite the clear
conflict of interest, that same cop who perpetrated the racist attack pursued
the case as both the alleged victim and the investigating officer. Canada accepted the request despite the
destruction of evidence, the deaths of witnesses, and major inconsistencies in
the file.
And then there was what is one of the most high-profile
extradition cases in Canada, the still ongoing saga of Dr. Hassan Diab. Sought
by a country, France, which refuses to extradite its own citizens, Diab spent
three years in a French prison, without charge. This despite the fact that he
did not share the finger and palm prints, or the physical description, of the
original suspect in a 1980 crime. Diab was also the subject of secret
intelligence that, his lawyers argued, was “based largely on intelligence
reports from unnamed foreign entities, who in turn obtained information from
unknown sources in unknown circumstances.” Notably, malfeasance by
officials in the Canadian Justice Department only prolonged Dr. Diab’s
nightmare, and no one has been held to account.
Like Michele, Dr. Diab was subjected to years of severe bail
restrictions, which in his case included an ankle monitoring bracelet for which
he had to foot the $2,000 monthly bill.
This is the type of judicially sanctioned political persecution
that ruins the lives of individuals and their families. Those sought for
extradition learn quickly there is little hope. As Manitoba Queen's Bench Justice Freda Steel
concluded in a 1999 extradition case, "evidence at an extradition
hearing should be accepted even if the judge feels it is manifestly unreliable,
incomplete, false, misleading, contradictory of other evidence or the judge
feels the witness may have perjured themselves."
Indeed, Steel quotes a fellow judge as
noting that questioning the validity of a requesting state’s often paper-thin,
fabricated, perjured, misleading, or contradictory evidence "conveys a reflection
of the gravest possible kind, not only upon the motives and actions of the
responsible government, but also impliedly upon the judicial authorities of a
neighbouring and friendly power.”
It is against this background that Michele knew the cards were
stacked against her. But she also shared a perverse hope. She actually believed
(and who wouldn't want to?) that if only the right people looked at the case
file – the documentation of abuse, the testimony of the fearful children,
the evaluation from Children’s Services that the father was not safe to be
around, the history of abuse against her—that someone would believe her. Yet even at Canada’s highest judicial
level, judges were asking the usual questions that women survivors of male
violence always get asked: why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that?
Insults at the Supreme Court
I was sitting behind Michele and three of her kids during her 2015
Supreme Court hearing, and saw her back visibly stiffen when Justice Michael
Moldaver betrayed his own lack of understanding of the dynamics of male
violence against women and children. He knew that, in Michele’s case, the
children were not taken from the father’s home, but rather had escaped and
sought their mother’s assistance. Michele had argued that because the children
were in danger and everything else she had tried to protect them had proven
unsuccessful, a trip to Canada was the only option.
"She didn't take the children from the
father at the house in terms of him having possession,” Moldaver declared. “She took them [after] they'd already left. Where's the imminent harm?
I'm just kinda missing that. Imminent harm's gotta mean something.” Had one of
the allegedly most learned judges in the land not looked at the court record,
which included the report from Quebec’s Director of Youth Protection (DYP)? The
DYP accepted the conclusion of Child
and Family Services in Georgia that they could not confirm that “the children
will be safe from abuse if taken back to Georgia.” Sounds a lot like imminent
harm. The learned judge also seems to have overlooked in the court record the
very explicit details of the beatings the children had run away from, the
father’s imprisoning of the children in a locked basement, and the children’s
own statements that they were fearful of their father.
But as
advocates working to end male violence against women see every day, such facts
magically disappear in cases where misogyny’s logical results come before a
judicial setting. (Anyone who still doubts how unsafe calling the cops and going
to court are for women survivors should read Elizabeth Sheehy’s Defending Battered Women on Trial and Elaine Craig’s Putting Trials on Trial: Sexual Assault and the Failure of the Legal
Profession.)
Indeed, Moldaver
later asked the “why didn't she go to police” question with a Don Cherry-esque
air of exasperation. “There were all kinds of other options
available at that point other than escaping to Canada,” Moldaver opined, referencing an incident in which Georgia
police had stopped Michele and the children for an alleged DUI incident (for
which Michele was never charged). Moldaver demands: “What
better opportunity to say ‘by the way officer, my children are in imminent
harm. Please do something?’”
Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin also
questioned Michele’s lawyer along similar lines, noting: “It is suggested in
some of the material of the [government] that she should have just gone to
court or done something like that if your children are in trouble with their
custodial parent. This is what we encourage citizens to do in our country. What
do you say to that?”
Michele was
no stranger to having dealt with the Georgia police and courts. She spoke often
of their corruption, their collusion with abusers, and their dismissive
attitude when it was obvious who was the target of abuse. Indeed, desperately
afraid of what awaited her in Georgia – “they cannot extradite a corpse,” she
told me a few days before her life ended – Michele knew with certainty in her
soul that she would not receive a fair trial, would be housed indefinitely in a
private, for-profit prison, and would serve long years for an alleged offence
that provided her no proper defence in Georgia.
Raybould-Wilson Adds Insult to Injury
Michele was
not alone in her fears. Three justices of the Supreme Court of Canada (all
women) agreed with her when they delivered a dissenting opinion on her case in
2015. Justice Rosalie Abella pointed out
that “the defence of rescuing children to protect them from imminent harm does
not exist in Georgia [and] the mother will not be able to raise the defence she
would have been able to raise had she been prosecuted in Canada.” This
contradiction violates a cornerstone of extradition law, the “double
criminality” requirement that the Supreme Court acknowledges is a process that
ensures Canada is “not embarrassed by an obligation to extradite a person who
would not, according to its own standards, be guilty of acts deserving
punishment.”
Unfortunately, the court’s
three male members – supported by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin – voted
against her in a decision the dissenters called “kafkasesque,” a rare public
rebuke.
When Michele won her
Christmas reprieve in 2015, we felt strongly that putting forward new
information to Raybould-Wilson – including an expert legal opinion that
reminded the Justice Department’s legal staff once again that there was no
defence available to Michele in Georgia – would turn the tide. But it was not
to be so. Seven months later, Raybould-Wilson signed the surrender order, what
eventually proved to be a death writ for Michele.
Raybould-Wilson’s arguments
defending the surrender order could have been written by an angry men’s rights
activist. In one particularly insulting section, the Justice Minister wrote
with the dismissive language that has been heard by countless abuse survivors: “In my view, even applying the most generous
modified objective standard to the situation that takes into account Ms.
Messina’s claimed background as an abused spouse, it cannot be said that she
was of the opinion that at the time that the children were at risk of ‘imminent
harm.’”
Raybould-Wilson criticized
Michele for not allegedly providing “any reasons for not contacting the police
or child and family services on behalf of her children regarding her concerns
about her children’s well-being.” Raybould-Wilson continued by claiming Michele
“had adequate opportunity to contact the authorities and it cannot be said that
there were no legal alternatives such that she was left with no choice but to
take the children to Canada.”
The former Justice Minister
also seemed more concerned here about the abusive father that the children
clearly did not want to see. In one stunning sentence, Raybould-Wilson’s
complained that in her view, Michele had “deprived” the abusive father “of the
reasonable opportunity to visit his children.” Clearly, Raybould-Wilson took no
account of the DYP report that showed that in one 2011 interview with the
father, “at no time did the father call
the children by their names. It was the ‘girls’ or the ‘boy.’ He did not
express that he loved the children and wanted them to return home.”
Raybould-Wilson also
downplayed the well-documented violence the children and Michele had experienced
by conceding she recognized that “the children’s accounts of their relationship
with their father are less than positive.” She also downplayed the violence
with the implication that it could not have been that bad given that the
children did not complain to a high school counselor about the abuse and that
they attended school regularly. (What high school student shares anything with
an over-worked school counselor, knowing that it could result in a phone call
home and retaliatory violence from an abuser?)
The painful conclusion of
Raybould-Wilson was that “it cannot be said that the harm that [Michele] was attempting
to avoid was proportionate to the harm that she caused her children.”
During last winter’s SNC-Lavalin
scandal revelations, one could forgive Michele for agreeing that
Raybould-Wilson was not the fount of integrity and justice that everyone made
her out to be.
Trying to Move On
Michele’s children, her
mother, and her friends, are all still trying to deal with the shock of what
has happened. In follow-up conversations with those who knew and loved her –
and those who knew her dearly did love her – it was clear to me that everyone
was in a state of disbelief that Canada’s judicial system had reached such a
point that it would expend such vast resources to ensnare and throw away a
mother who saved her kids.
When Michele’s life ended in early November, it was widely known
by inmates and staff at the brutal Leclerc prison that this was a preventable
suicide; the jail staff and inmates all knew when she entered that she was
suicidal. While investigations are likely to follow, it does not appear from this
angle that necessary precautions were taken.
Michele’s final, desperate act might be more accurately described
as the result of a years-long, slow-drip act of institutional femicide. Her
loss shines a light on so many pressing social issues that continue to be swept
aside, including a compelling need to undertake serious reforms to the
Extradition Act that would bring it in line with domestic and international
human rights standards. Dr. Hassan Diab – Michele had often prayed for him and
followed his case – had called for a public inquiry that would point the
direction forward, but that was rejected by Raybould-Wilson in favour of a
severely limited review that led to a complete and total whitewash.
When she was in jail,
Michele often spoke about the women she met there, many of whom were Indigenous
and/or being held on immigration holds. They all shared stories of being
separated from loved ones. As an older inmate, Michele was often seen as the motherly
aunt figure to whom many would go with their problems, their fears, and their
tears.
Michele’s life and death also screams out for the desperate need to
develop and implement a United Nations-mandated National Action Plan to End
Violence Against Women and Girls. In February 2015, Women’s Shelters Canada
launched A Blueprint for Canada’s
National Action Plan (NAP) on Violence against Women (VAW). As of
today, there is still no such action plan (but rather only a very skeletal
proposal from a Trudeau government that seems unwilling to properly prioritize
this national crisis.) It also reminds
us that the largest percentage of women behind bars in this country are
Indigenous, and that there needs to be mmediate action on the call from the
National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls for the
creation of a national plan to address violence against Indigenous women,
girls, and 2SLGBTQI+ people.
She sometimes spoke about
one day becoming a paralegal to help women in her shoes. She also said that one
of the worst things about being in jail was being away from her beloved
flowers.
As I made the painful round
of calls two weeks ago to let friends and family know of this outcome, one
long-time friend from Georgia sighed on the other end of the line. “We can’t let her story be left untold,” she said.
With
that in mind, a public memorial
will take place at the front entrance to the Justice Department in Ottawa at 12
noon on Monday, November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of
Violence against Women. Called “Roses for Michele,” this memorial will place
the flowers that she loved at the foot of the building where such horrible
decisions were made. It will be followed
later in the week by a group in Montreal gathering to honour Michele’s life by
writing to prisoners still left behind in Leclerc prison.
This post originally appeared on rabble.ca, by Matthew Behrens