Book Review: Reckoning With Racism: Police, Judges, and the RDS Case

Several times each month, we are pleased to republish a recent book review from the Canadian Law Library Review (CLLR). CLLR is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD), and its reviews cover both practice-oriented and academic publications related to the law.

Reckoning with Racism: Police, Judges, and the RDS Case. By Constance Backhouse. UBC Press: Vancouver, 2022. 289 p. Includes chronology, bibliographic notes, illustrations, and index. ISBN 9780774868228 (hardcover) $75.00; ISBN 9780774868273 (softcover) $27.95; ISBN 9780774868297 (ePUB) $27.95; ISBN 9780774868280 (PDF) $27.95.

Reviewed by Lori O’Connor
Public Prosecutions
Melfort, SK

Reckoning with Racism is a compulsively readable, fascinating book that intertwines questions concerning reasonable apprehension of bias with how a judge’s rulings should be informed by the life experience of the accused in the context of one Canadian criminal court decision.

The book opens with the trial of RDS, identified as Rodney Small, who was 16 years old at the time of the offence. His identity was protected by the Youth Criminal Justice Act, and the author, law professor Constance Backhouse, notes that RDS has waived the publication ban on his name.

In 1992, Rodney Small came upon his cousin being arrested in Halifax. He stopped, and as a result was arrested for obstructing a peace officer, assaulting a peace officer with the intent to interfere with the arrest, and assaulting a peace officer. The only witnesses were the police officer and Small. At trial, Judge Corrine Sparks, at that time the only Black judge in Nova Scotia, found that, based on her experience as a Black woman, police overreact when dealing with non- white groups, and she proceeded to acquit RDS. The case made its way through the Nova Scotia Supreme Court and the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal before, finally, it was heard by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1997.

Backhouse provides biographical details for all the parties involved: the arresting officer; Small; the defense lawyer, Rocky Jones; the prosecutor, Rick Miller; and the trial judge, Judge Corrine Sparks. She also profiles the other parties as they appear in the narrative, including all the appellate judges in Nova Scotia. Situating the circumstances of the offence within the racial history of Nova Scotia, particularly regarding policing and the law, Backhouse details both the erasure of African Nova Scotian communities and the lack of awareness of implicit bias within the legal and policing community.

The book details the original trial decision, the Nova Scotia Supreme Court appeal decision, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal decision, and the Supreme Court of Canada decision. Backhouse also spends one chapter discussing the impact of gender and how society and the justice system treated Judge Sparks herself, an important consideration given the intersectionality of her gender and race.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld Judge Sparks’s acquittal of RDS. The court’s decision helped reinforce that all justice system participants come before the court with their own implicit biases, and that the white male worldview is not necessarily the default—nor should it be. Backhouse’s analysis of the decision helps shed light on the debates over whether participants in the criminal justice system may draw upon their own life experiences and, if so, how.

As an alumna of both the Indigenous Blacks & Mi’kmaq Initiative and the Dalhousie Legal Aid Clinic, I was delighted to see so many prominent members of that community cited throughout the book. Backhouse is conscious of her privilege as a white academic and is careful to use the words and voices of the members of the African Nova Scotian community to tell their stories.

Reckoning with Racism ends with a brief update on each of the participants and concludes with a discussion of how this case has and will continue to influence the “racelessness” of the Canadian legal system. I highly recommended this book to everyone working in criminal law and those working with racialized communities, and especially those in Nova Scotia. It will also resonate with fans of true crime, community building, and anti-racist activism.