Person(s) of interest and missing women: legal abandonment in the Downtown Eastside.

• Author: Craig, Elaine
• Position: British Columbia, Canada

The criminal prosecution of Robert Pickton involved an eleven-month jury trial, two appeals to the British Columbia Court of Appeal, an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, and seventy-six reported judicial rulings. This article, through a combination of discursive and doctrinal analyses of these seventy-six decisions, examines what was (not) achieved by the Pickton trial. It discusses three areas: the judicial representation of the women Pickton was prosecuted for murdering; the implications of the jury's verdict in the Pickton proceedings; and the impact of the Pickton trial on the families of the women he murdered. The article starts from the premise that it is correct to characterize these murders as a product of collective violence. Colonialism, political and legal infrastructure, and public discourse--and hegemonies based on race, class, and gender that these processes, institutions, and practices hold in place--produced a particular class of vulnerable women, the police who failed them, and Robert Pickton. The article concludes by suggesting that the outcomes of the Pickton prosecution both highlight the limitations of the criminal justice system and offer an analytical framework for examining other institutional responses (such as the Missing Women's Inquiry) to the kind of collective violence that gave rise to the Pickton circumstance.

Les poursuites penales contre Robert Pickton ont compris un proces devant un jury de onze mois, deux appels a la Cour d'appel de la Colombie-Britannique, un appel a la Cour supreme du Canada et soixante-seize jugements. Cet article s'interroge, par une combinaison d'analyses discursive et doctrinale de ces soixante-seize decisions, sur ce que le proces Pickton a (et n'a pas) accompli, abordant trois aspects de ce proces : la representation judiciaire des femmes que Pickton a tue; les implications du verdict du jury; et l'impact du proces sur les familles des femmes qu'il a tue. L'article se fonde sur la notion que l'on peut caracteriser ces meurtres comme etant des produits de la violence collective. Le colonialisme, l'infrastructure politique et juridique, et le discours public, de plus que les hegemonies basees sur la race, la classe, et le genre, que ces processus, ces institutions et ces pratiques maintiennent, ont produit a la fois une classe particuliere de femmes vulnerables, la police qui leur a manque et Robert Pickton lui-meme. En conclusion, l'article conclut en suggere que les resultats du proces Pickton mettent en evidence les limites du systeme de justice penale et offrent un cadre analytique pour l'examen d'autres reponses institutionnelles (telles que l'Enquete sur les femmes disparues) au genre de violence collective qui a provoque la circonstance Pickton.

1. The Pickton Circumstance II. The Story of the Missing Women as Reported by the Courts III. The Pickton Prosecution Did Not Produce a Truth Account IV. Did the Pickton Trial Achieve Justice for the Families? V. Conclusions on the Limits of the Criminal Justice Response I. The Pickton Circumstance

   Women are disappearing. Sixty-nine of them disappeared from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver between 1997 and 2002. (1) Northern communities in British Columbia believe that more than forty women have gone missing from the Highway of Tears in the past thirty years. (2) The endangered do not come from every walk of life. Most of these women are Aboriginal. Many of them are poor. (3)

   To be more precise then, poor women and Aboriginal women are disappearing. (4) Aboriginal women in particular are the targets of an undeniable epidemic of violence in Canada. (5) They are five to seven times more likely to be killed as a result of violence than are non-Aboriginal women. (6)

   Robert Pickton is thought to have murdered almost fifty of the women reported as missing from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver between 1997 and 2002. Following years of widespread indifference toward the shocking number of women that continued to disappear from this neighbourhood in Vancouver, an investigation finally resulted in Pickton's arrest in 2002. Pickton confessed to killing forty-nine women with an aspiration to make it an "even fifty". (7) The DNA of thirty-three missing women was found on his farm. (8) He was charged with murdering twenty-six women, and charges against him were recommended with respect to several other missing women. (9) Following Pickton's conviction for murder in only six of these cases, (10) the government of British Columbia conducted a public inquiry into police failures to investigate the disappearances in a timely manner. (11)

   The Missing Women Commission of Inquiry concluded that "in the cold hard light of 2012, using an objective test and avoiding the unerring eye of hindsight ... the missing and murdered women investigations were a blatant failure." (12) According to the BC Civil Liberties Association, Pivot Legal Society and West Coast LEAF, the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry was also "an absolute failure". (13) The police investigation into missing and murdered women in the Downtown Eastside and the Missing Women's Inquiry into that police investigation constitute two institutional responses to these disappearances. Their failings and achievements have received public, media, and government attention. (14) To date, what has not received as much attention is the criminal justice system's response to the murder of these women. (15)

   The criminal prosecution of Robert Pickton involved an eleven-month jury trial, two appeals to the British Columbia Court of Appeal, an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, $12 million in defence counsel legal expenses, a $2 million upgrade to the New Westminster courthouse, $9 million in Crown counsel expenses, $12 million in judicial support, trial support, security, and management costs, and seventy-six reported judicial rulings. (16) This article, through a combination of discursive and doctrinal analysis of these seventy-six decisions, examines what was (not) achieved by the Pickton trial. It discusses three areas: the judicial representation of the women Pickton was prosecuted for murdering; the implications of the jury's verdict in the Pickton proceedings; and the impact of the Pickton trial on the families of the women he murdered. (17)

   The article starts from the premise that it is correct to characterize these murders as a product of collective violence. The World Health Organization defines collective violence as "the instrumental use of violence by people who identify themselves as members of a group--whether this group is transitory or has a more permanent identity--against another group or set of individuals, in order to achieve political, economic or social objectives." (18) Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Georgina Papin, Marnie Frey and countless others from the Downtown Eastside were rendered subhuman and disposed of well before they encountered Robert Pickton. The horror of what Robert Pickton did to these women, and of a police force that ignored what was happening for years, (19) pales in comparison to the collective violence that produced these subjects and their actions. Colonialism, sexism, the political and legal infrastructure, public, media and legal discourse--and the race-, class-, and gender-based hegemonies that these processes, institutions, policies, and practices hold in place---produced a class of vulnerable women, the police who failed them, and Robert Pickton.

   To put it otherwise, it is unsurprising that these women in particular, from this community in particular, were murdered. "Do you think Willie Pickton just entered this picture out of the blue? I mean, we created a pool that nobody cared about, and he went to it." (20) It is unsurprising that the police investigation into the murdered and missing women was a "blatant failure". (21) Entrenched structural inequalities in Canadian society produced a category of illegible subjects, denied access to the social contract upon which the state's monopoly on power and the paramilitary organizations charged with enforcing it are purportedly justified. In a sense, it is also unsurprising that Robert Pickton took Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Georgina Papin, and Marnie Frey, paid them for vaginal or oral intercourse, murdered them, dismembered their bodies, and distributed and disposed of what was left of them at the local meat shops and rendering plant where he sent the pigs he purchased each week at auction. (22) What Robert Pickton did to these women was the material articulation of a social, political, and legal rendering that had already occurred--"a kind of bestialization of [wo] man achieved through the most sophisticated political techniques." (23) This article examines what role the criminal justice process plays in constituting or perpetuating the social relations that produce this bestialization.

   While somewhat awkward, referring to the "Pickton circumstance"--rather than to Pickton's actions--is also intentional. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing the social relations that produced this collective violence--the way in which women from the Downtown Eastside were abandoned through processes that deprived them of citizenship and humanity in order to maintain the hegemonic structures that produce citizenship and preserve humanity for some by abandoning others.

   The remainder of the article is divided into four parts. Part II examines the representation of the murdered women in the judicial decisions produced throughout the Pickton proceedings. The prosecution of Pickton, because it produced seventy-six separate decisions, offers a unique opportunity to examine the anatomy of a case as articulated through judicial rulings. (24) Part II reveals that the criminal justice process as reported by the courts did not recognize the humanity and citizenship of the murdered women through the story it told...