HALIFAX — Donald Marshall Jr. stood for justice in his life and continues to be honoured in his death.
On March 12, the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society will host a day-long symposium to honour Marshall’s legacy at the Mi’kmaq Native Friendship Centre on Gottingen Street in Halifax.
It comes 20 years after a royal commission in 1990 found that prejudice and institutional racism in Nova Scotia’s justice system led to Marshall’s wrongful murder conviction.
In 1971, the then 17-year-old Membertou resident was wrongly convicted of a murder in Sydney.
“When they sent him to prison, it was hard on the family,” his sister Roseanne Sylvester recalled in a recent interview, conducted six months after her brother’s death.
Marshall spent 11 years in prison before he was freed and subsequently acquitted. Another man was eventually convicted of the murder.
In 1999, Marshall scored his second major legal victory. That year, the Supreme Court of Canada sided with him in a decision that confirmed native fishing rights.
The decision came three years after Marshall was charged with fishing eels out of season, fishing without a licence and trying to sell illegally caught eels.
He took the case to the country’s highest court because he believed the treaties signed by his Mi’kmaq ancestors gave him the right to fish year-round and sell his catch — and the court agreed.
“He probably didn’t expect to accomplish all this when he was caught fishing the eels,” said Sylvester.
Emma Halpern, the bar society’s equity officer, said Marshall’s cases changed Canadian law, setting precedents in the area of wrongful convictions, compensation for those wrongfully convicted and aboriginal rights.
Halpern said the society always envisioned recognizing his impact on the aboriginal community and society in general, and the symposium is its way of honouring the mark he made on the legal profession.
Marshall died last August at age 55 of complications from a double-lung transplant he had in 2003.
Marshall’s wife of two years, Colleen D’Orsay, knew a very private side of him.
“I think a lot of people have a lot of misconceptions about Donald and his legacy and what he’s done for Nova Scotia and marginalized people,” D’Orsay said in an interview from British Columbia, where she now lives.
“It’s important to know that what happened to Donald in his life could have happened to anyone and he was willing to stand up and make the most out of a bad situation . . . to make things better for others,” she said.
