Is this kind of stuff really still happening?
Well, today it is in Canada. While the news has been flying around about Ottawa Mayor Larry O'Brien's recent acquittal on the charges of influence peddling, not many are mentioning that the key witnesses' recollection of a conversation was deemed "of little weight" by the judge in part because she commutes to work every day while her kid stays at home with her husband.
That's right, politician Lisa MacLeod's testimony was declared unacceptable for corroboration by Justice Douglas Cunningham of Ontario Superior Court, implying that being a working mom has made her life too complicated for her to appropriately account her statement. Said the judge:
"The defence was able to demonstrate that there were a number of rather significant things going on in her life when she gave her statement to the police. ... ""She was commuting regularly to Toronto for her work, leaving her husband and child in Ottawa,"
Because the overwhelming combination of working while a mom (gasp!), leaving your kid with the stay-at-home dad (double gasp!) on top of a long commute to work (wowowow!) is just too much for our little lady brains. MacLeod, the Conservative MPP for Nepean-Carleton, said the judge's comments were "pathetic" and "surreal."
"I didn't know truth had a gender or a family."
Pic via the Globe and Mail.
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This is ridiculous! Lisa MacLeod is my MPP and Larry O'Brien is my (much despised) mayor. While I don't necessarily agree with all of her policies, I can recognize that she is an incredibly capable woman. That her testimony should be dismissed like this is unbelievable. Not to mantion, I'm super pissed that Larry O'Brien is still in office after all the bullshit he's pulled as mayor of Ottawa.
Thanks for posting this--Ottawa is my city and while I won't call Larry O'Brien my mayor (I sure as hell didn't vote for him) of course this trial affects all of us Ottawa residents. I had no idea about this particular aspect of the case.
Thanks for reminding me why it's important for me to form the first YWTF Canadian chapter.
PS: Check us out! http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=91358133865
But how can this have happened? There is no 'culture of misogyny'. We "no longer have anything to fight for".
I will say it again. This is one more reason why we need to stand up and do something. Right now, not in a few days, not in a few months. Now
It's frustrating isn't it, how (comparatively) few people feel that sense of urgency. Bit like a twilight zone episode, in which one is standing watching a building in flames, but all the other pedestrians are just walking calmly on by. We keep screaming "Fire!" until we're hoarse, but no one heeds.
It's a wonder this poor woman even found her office considering the pea-size womanly brain she has...
How... appalling.
...oh no, going back to the bad old days...
in the u.s. there was a time when black ppl could not give legal testimony in court.
there was a time when women were considered their husband's "property"
now, in the 21st century(??), a woman who is not a homemaker is deemed ineligible to give legal testimony --- ITS ALL ABOUT CONTROLLING WOMEN'S STATUS --- you don't need 'yer own money...ought to be having a baby...not paying for it (...wait, what?)
---*anger*grumble*seethe---
I think the newspaper article, and consequently this post, inaccurately describe the judge's opinion, which can be found here:
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/pdf/decision.pdf
As I read the opinion, the judge did not discount or dismiss the MPP's testimony because she's a working mother and/or she has a young child and/or her husband stayed at home. The MPP was testifying about a brief portion of a conversation that had happened more than three years before she testified, and the MPP gave several different versions of the conversation, even within her own testimony. The MPP even acknowledged that she couldn't recall the precise details (not surprisingly, since the conversation occurred so long before and didn't last that long).
The bit about her commuting and leaving her family at home was introduced on cross-examination (along with the fact that her father had been diagnosed with cancer) as examples of stressful events she was experiencing at the time she gave her initial statement to the police, thus explaining why her recall of the conversation mights be imprecise. (This is the defense argument at any rate). Although the judge recounted this evidence in his opinion, he doesn't seem to rely on it in his determination regarding the credibility of the MPP's testimony. Rather, the judge states that, because of the differing versions of the conversation that the MPP testified to, the judge could not determine with any degree of certainty what exactly was said during the cruscial conversation.
i just don't see how her commuting is any more stressfull than any other people giving testimony. many, if not most adults work for a living -- its not a especially stressfull when women do it.
in fact, with a stay at home dad, she had less stress than the avg working mom....
Different people react differently to the same set of circumstances, of course. The MPP may have testified that her commuting was stressful to her (as mine was to me when I had to go on business trips when my daughter was 3-4 years old). The judge's opinion doesn't say. But that's why I think it's important to clarify that the judge doesn't seem to cite "stress" as playing any role in his determination of the MPP's testimony.
BTW, it's not clear to me that the MPP's spouse was a stay-at-home dad. The opinion said that the MPP "was commuting regularly to Toronto for her work, leaving her husband and child in Ottawa." Her spouse may very well have been working outside the home.
I believe the view wasn't that she's a woman she was stressed out and can't remember. But an issue of, the facts she was testifying to must have seemed pretty minor at the time. Considering all of the things which were more important, and all the stress she may have been exposed to would a minor detail in a conversation held a fair amount of time prior be recalled accurately?
If I witness a person commit a crime, then I'll likely remember that, regardless of my levels of stress. However, if only a number of months later, with new information revealed do I realize that some comment they made might have had significance, that introduces some doubt if I remember the precise wording of the conversation.
I'm a retired U.S. trial attorney and I agree with your assessment. Although the language about her commuting and leaving her family at home looks somewhat suspicious, it was something that would be expected to be introduced (about either a male or female)and the judge would have been remiss not to have taken it into account. And since it would be proper for the judge to take it into account, it also was proper for the judge to include it in the decision.
It certainly wouldn’t surprise me in other cases if a judge used stereotypical thinking to think less of the credibility of a female witness, but I don’t think that happened here.
My understanding, from the scant information given by the articles on this, is that she wasn't a witness, but rather called to offer testimony to corroborate some of the more minor details offered by the prosecutions main witness, to give the primary witness more credibility.
The defense decided to focus on the fact that these details seem fairly mundane, by suggesting her recollection of details which at the time seemed minor might not be perfect when so much else was going on.
There have been quite a few follow-up articles on this, including this one today:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/judge-was-only-reflecting-womans-own-testimony/article1250077/
This article gives actual excerpts from her testimony where she herself basically says she was too busy to remember exactly.
I still find the whole thing problematic - especially the judges wording - but I feel a bit better now that I've read this. That and others have pointed out similar cases where a man's testimony was dismissed for similar reasons.
Glad this got the press it did though regardless. Because this got a lot of publicity and alot of people talking about sexism.