Articles
Peer Reviewed Journal Articles
Published Articles
This article examined the Court’s decision in R v Le and made the claim that the Court may have lifted the judicial embargo on race-based Charter litigation – a problem identified by Professor David Tanovich years ago. There were legitimate reasons to celebrate this decision, but Danardo also warns that the precedential value of the decision would be significantly eroded if the decision was used in an unprincipled and uncoordinated fashion by defence counsel and judges. This article was cited the next year by the Quebec Superior Court in R v Dorfeuille, 2020 QCCS 1499.
This article explored the intersectional blind spots in R v. Desjourdy – a case involving allegations of sexual assault by a police sergeant Desjourdy against S.B., a young Black woman in police custody. The article examined the racial and gendered logic used by the trial judge and defence counsel to recast S.B. as deserving of the violence she endured at the hands of the police. Using the transcripts of Desjourdy’s trial and drawing upon sexual assault and critical race literatures, the article explored the systemic biases that favour police officers on trial and facilitate the construction of white innocence and racialized danger.
This article examined the use of race-based pre-sentence reports in sentencing proceedings involving Black offenders. I began this research during my LLM and further expanded the idea in this article. In this piece, I commented on the ONCA’s attempt at crafting a sentencing methodology attentive to race and anti-Blackness. Specifically, the ONCA explained what role the acknowledgement of anti-Black racism and race should play in crafting a proportionate sentence for a Black offender. Through its sustained analysis of this urgent question, I argued in this article that R v Morris may represent a watershed moment in the criminal jurisprudence relating to the sentencing of Black offenders.
The article takes as it's starting point the claim that anti-Black racism permeates Canadian society and finds expression in our institutions, most notably the criminal justice system. Indeed, anti- Black racism in criminal justice and its impact on Black lives are not credibly in dispute. Thus, what should concern legal scholars is the staying power or permanence of racism. In other words, should Canadian legal scholars ‘get real’ about the intractability of race? Or can anti-Black racism be effectively confronted by developing legal and evidentiary tools designed to fix, rather than dismantle, the current system? Put another way, the article moves from describing a well-known phenomenon—the existence of anti-Black racism in the criminal justice system—to identifying radical approaches to confront and subvert it. In that vein, this article explores a critical question: how can we make the leap from CRT to CRT-inspired, lifeline criminal jurisprudence?
In this article I argue that courts should carefully consider the intersectional and spatial implications of expanding, creating or reinforcing existing police search powers. Indeed, as explained by Penney et al., such intersectional and spatial blind spots are troubling because the search incident to arrest power is “disproportionately visited on individuals disadvantaged by poverty and race.” These authors also aptly observed that “courts must remember to scrutinize [..] claims of [public safety searches] carefully so as to guard against “public safety” being used as pretext to circumvent well-established constitutional standards.” Such forethought will avoid unintended consequences and reliance on exclusionary remedies to distance courts from unlawful and racist police conduct.
Forthcoming
“Probing the Data: Perspectives on Race Visibility in Canadian Sentencing Proceedings”, (2024) Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice
This article is the second of two companion pieces. It analyzes interview data generated from Black criminalized individuals and defence lawyers about the utility of heightened race visibility in sentencing proceedings. The data revealed a schism between these groups: What I refer to as the paradox of racial visibility.
“Reading Below the Surface: Telling Tales” Journal of Law and Social Policy.
On the surface, R.D.S. is the leading case on the test for reasonable apprehension of bias. However, reading “beyond the ratio,” R.D.S. tells another critical, albeit obscured narrative: i.e. the limits and paradoxicalities of utilizing Black voices/knowledge in deciding criminal case. This article will engage in a subtextual analysis of the R.D.S. decision to reveal some of the latent/untold stories and racial costs/burdens that are significant, albeit obscured, legacies of R.D.S. In other words, it will tell stories that, at first glance, seem apocryphal in that they challenge official accounts; but are, nonetheless, legacies of the decision. Part one of the article discusses some of these stories and their racial implications. Whereas Part two explores the limits and paradoxicalities of judicial diversity.
“Paradoxical Race Visibility in Canadian Sentencing Law”, (2024) 102:2 Canadian Bar Review.
Using insights from Critical Race Theory (“CRT”), this article illustrates how Canada’s proportionality-driven criminal sentencing structure (re)produces, invigorates, and sustains pernicious race-based discourses. Indeed, the concept of proportionality can reinforce archaic norms and notions about Black bodies’ status, belonging, identity, and worth. Moreover, the demands of proportionality, with its fixation on calibrating blame, can distort and pathologize Black lives in a perverse attempt at sentence mitigation, resulting in what I refer to as the paradox of visibility. By exploring paradoxical race visibility, we can better comprehend and redefine the impact of incorporating race awareness into the criminal sentencing process, which can have positive and negative consequences. Indeed, introducing race at the sentencing phase is a challenging and perhaps even a paradoxical manoeuvre – but one that may also be logical insofar as we operate within the cruel illogic of white supremacy.
"Managing Expectations: Racial Realism and Criminal Trials" in Lorne Foster and Les Jacobs, The Black Book: Public Sector Investigations in Disaggregated Race Data, (University of Toronto Press).
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In this article I build on insights I learned from my research in “R v Desjourdy: A Narrative of White Innocence and Racialized Danger” regarding the systemic biases that favour police officers on trial. Drawing on critical race theory, particularly Derrick Bell's racial realism thesis, this article analyzes how the case of R. v. Theriault stands as a paradigmatic outcome from a criminal justice system grounded in and framed by anti-Black racist ideologies.
Non- Peer Reviewed Articles
Published
Unpublished
“Punishing Black Bodies in Canada: Making Blackness Visible in Criminal Sentencing” (Master of Laws Thesis, York University, Osgoode Hall Law School, 2019)
Book Chapters
“Sentencing Black Offenders”, in Sentencing and Penal Policy in Canada: Cases, Materials, and Commentary, Chapter 17, Emond Publishing, 2023, Eds - Allan S. Manson, Patrick Healy, Gary Trotter, Julian Roberts, and Dales Ives, 4th ed.
“Taking Evidence of Anti-Black Racism into Account on Sentencing”, in Hill, S Casey et. al., McWilliams’ Canadian Criminal Evidence, 5th edition, 2022, Thomson Reuters Canada
Books
In Progress
Journeys Through the Darkscape: Exploring the Spatial Dimensions of Racial Profiling, Toronto: Routledge.
Documentaries