Eleven Years for a Killing He Did Not Commit: The Case of Donald Marshall Junior.

In 1971, Donald Marshall Jr. was wrongfully convicted of killing his friend in Nova Scotia. And even after the conviction was overturned, he was still blamed for the judicial error.In 1971 the Mi’kmaw community of Membertou sat on a hill roughly three kilometres above downtown Sydney, Nova Scotia. It had been placed there in 1926, after prominent Sydney residents spent years petitioning to have the King’s Road Reserve removed from the expanding city core. They argued that their Mi’kmaw neighbours drove down property values and endangered public health. The Exchequer Court of Canada ordered the move, the first time a Canadian court legally compelled an Indigenous community to relocate.Donald Marshall Junior grew up there, the son of the Grand Chief of the Mi’kmaq. He was seventeen and had a few minor brushes with the law.Shortly before midnight on 28 May 1971, Marshall left a dance and met Sandy Seale by chance. Seale was also seventeen, Black, from a strict family, expected home by curfew and carrying enough money for the bus. The two barely knew one another. They walked into Wentworth Park.There they met Roy Ebsary, 59, a former ship’s cook with a reputation for violence and a knife conviction, and James MacNeil, 25, an unemployed labourer. Ebsary and MacNeil began the conversation. After several minutes one of the younger men asked for money. Ebsary said, “This is for you, Black man,” and drove a knife into Seale’s stomach, then lunged at Marshall and cut his arm. Marshall’s wound was slight. Seale died within a day.Four constables answered the call: Leo Mroz, Howard Dean, Richard Walsh and Martin MacDonald. They left the scene unguarded, searched nothing and questioned nobody. No autopsy was ever performed on Seale.Marshall told the police what had happened. By the next morning Sergeant of Detectives John MacIntyre had settled on a different account: that Marshall had stabbed Seale during an argument. Two witnesses, George and Sandy MacNeil, described two men in the park matching Marshall’s description. MacIntyre set those statements aside and never went looking for Ebsary.He turned instead to teenagers. Maynard Chant was fourteen and on probation, frightened of jail. John Pratico was sixteen and unstable, known to invent stories. Both first gave accounts supporting Marshall. MacIntyre took Pratico to the scene, supplied him with a version of events, and obtained a second statement, then pressed Chant into corroborating it.Donald Marshall Junior was charged with murder on 4 June 1971. The Royal Commission later found that MacIntyre shared what it called “a general sense in Sydney’s White community” that Indians were worth less than whites.I plan to make this into a series that documents the police corruption, the systemic racism, and the wrongful conviction that robbed this young man of 11 years of his life.Join our community so you don’t miss out. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit quietcanines.substack.com/subscribe