Cayuga • A sentencing hearing for a Six Nations man convicted of a violent assault during the native occupation of Caledonia will go on for another day after the judge said it was threatening to become “an anthropological walk in the park” through the thorny issues of institutional racism, aboriginal alternative justice and the fiery political climate that had engulfed the Southern Ontario community.
“There is no doubt about it, generally speaking, that [aboriginals] have incurred racism, but so have immigrants,” Justice Alan Whitten said as defence lawyer Sarah Dover tried to present testimony that Richard Smoke, the then-teenage protester convicted of the 2007 beating of a local non-native resident, had been profoundly affected by a deep culture of racism at his high school.
“Of course anybody would love to wave a wand and make some of the sad history go away, but I can’t,” he said, adding that the sentencing hearing was not “a platform for one side versus the other side feeling disenfranchised.”
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