You showed them, Mr. Mayor
Dear Mayor Kelly,
Congratulations. You showed those dangerous... democrats.
Who knows what calamities might have befallen our fair city if those peaceful hooligans had been allowed to stage yet another one of their interminable, speak-and-repeat, consensus-decision-making general assemblies on our sacredly public Grand Parade (which, until recently, served as a sacredly private parking lot for you and your fellow councillors, but, hey, that’s another story...)?
Those hippies could certainly take a lesson from you on doing democratic decision making right. In-camera, mumble, mumble, secret handshake, consensus achieved, call in the cops, Chinese wall, operational decision, nothing to do with us, move along, move along...
Brilliant.
And that bargaining in bad faith thing you did with them? Inviting them to camp out at the Common to get them away from your office and then, zap! No Victoria Park, no Grand Parade, no Common. Nyah, nyah...
Bylaw enforcement time.
Bam!
I mean, really, if they wanted to flout the law, they should have have done it in style—shredding the city charter and costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars like you did with that Common concert cash thingee. Now, that was flair!
The fact is, if you’re going to inconvenience the public, do it right. Forcing people to wander among tents and tenters to get where they’re going? No imagination. Close down the heart of the Common for a couple of weeks to put up a sound stage for some rockers no one pays to see. Now that takes guts.
So what if their tent city was less violent than the Palace on an average Friday night? That's not the point. The point is you showed them the point.
Personally, I thought the police—dozens and dozens of them, with their South Park Street-filling, light-flashing, murder-and-mayhem paddy wagons, patrol cars, motorcycles and tent-toting trailers and vans—showed remarkable restraint for having had to brave the elements on statutory holiday overtime pay. What is that? Double time? Double time and a half?
I agree. We have to be willing to pay a price for democracy, and it was vital the dismantling be done on Remembrance Day in the torrential rain and wind and mud so the public would be able to see for themselves exactly what those hippies had done to our parks. They'll remember.
Mr. Mayor, you showed them what your democracy looks like. Congratulations!
November 14, 2011
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Who wants to be mayor?
Is Tom Martin running for something?
I first met Martin in 2006 when I profiled him for The Coast. What intrigued me then was his passion for solving unsolved—seemingly un-solve-able—crimes. William Shrubsall, Kimberly McAndrew…
That passion earned him 2001 Police Officer of the Year honours, but cost him his health. Even after two heart attacks and on long-term disability, however, Martin pored over case files, searching for that clue, that new way of thinking about a detail that could solve a crime.
Three years later, I wrote about him again. By then, he’d retired, so he could speak openly about why he believes Halifax has one of Canada’s highest unsolved murder rates.
The officers at the top, he argues, don’t have the major-crime investigative experience to provide boots-on-the-ground leadership.
Martin came under fire for his comments, but he didn’t back down. My impression is he had the support of most of the cops on the street.
Fast forward to this month.
New crime stats. Thirteen more murders this year. No charges yet in eight. There are currently 57 unsolved murders on the books in Halifax, plus 13 missing persons, several of those almost certainly homicides.
In similar-sized London, ON, there is one unsolved murder.
What does Martin think?
Policing, he tells me, “is also community problem… The mayor and council should play significant roles.” Council, he suggests, could create citizen advisory committees that would focus on crime in their own neighbourhoods. “Who is the witness of a major crime likely to speak to? Someone they know and respect in the community? Or to the police?” The mayor, he says, needs to lead.
So… is he running for something?
Martin acknowledges he’s been asked to run for mayor, and is “seriously considering it.” Despite his policing background, he says, “with confidence,” he would not be a one-issue candidate.
Though he’s never been an elected politician—a plus?—Martin was Sheila Fougere’s campaign manager in the last mayoralty election. So he’s not a political neophyte.
With Peter Kelly committed to running, Mike Savage preparing to announce and Howard Epstein a possibility, this could be the most interesting mayoralty race in years.
Let the race begin.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
New agencies won’t resolve old case; we need an inquiry now
The Harper government’s proposal to replace the current, gums-only Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP with a new, baby-toothed civilian watchdog agency is better than nothing.
But not by much.
The new agency will have power to force witnesses to appear and testify, but will need to get the justice minister’s OK to initiate investigations. And there are Mack-truck-sized loopholes permitting the Mounties to withhold information.
Former complaints commissioner Shirley Heafey asks: “Where is the really big change that is going to make a difference in RCMP accountability across the country?” And answers: “I don’t see it.”
The new agency, of course, will also do nothing to resolve several ongoing, high-profile complaints, including one about the 2008 death of Nova Scotia Native John Simon on the Wagmatcook reserve.
On Dec. 2, 2008, an RCMP constable named Jeremy Frenette shot and killed Simon, who was alone inside his house, drunk and suicidal, at the time. By entering the house alone without a warrant, the junior RCMP officer violated his superior’s orders. Frenette claimed Simon—who was sitting on the toilet smoking a cigarette when he first slipped into the house—ran to the kitchen and grabbed a rifle. The officer fired three times, killing Simon. The rifle, which other witnesses didn’t see, wasn’t loaded.
The Mounties asked Halifax Regional Police to investigate. But its investigation was anything but arm’s length.
Gary Richard, the lawyer for the Wagamatcook First Nation, recently released emails he says show the Mounties were in the loop on the investigation and may have even influenced its final outcome. He also provided transcripts of interviews with potential witnesses whose evidence appears to have been ignored. Richard’s conclusion? The Halifax police department’s report was “incomplete and even, in some respects, indifferent.”
The current Commissioner for Complaints Against the RCMP, under pressure from First Nations groups, finally initiated his own probe this winter. But the commission’s powers are severely proscribed. Hence, the need to replace it.
Hence, the need for a provincial public inquiry. Nova Scotia Justice Minister Ross Landry, a 34-year RCMP veteran, refuses to call one.
But he does recognize the current police-investigate-police system is not the answer. Last fall he too announced plans for new legislation to create our own “independent” provincial unit to investigate allegations of police misconduct. But that legislation won’t be introduced until this fall. And it won’t look at old cases.
We need an independent inquiry—with teeth—now.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
The teacher, the hit man and the questions that remain
At first blush, it seemed like one of those tawdry, too-strange-to-be-true tabloid tales. In April 2008, a 38-year-old Digby County school teacher named Nicole Ryan was charged—along with her 70-year-old father—with trying to hire a hit man to murder her husband.
Because I follow most court cases from the comfortable periphery of my morning newspaper, I’ll confess this sordid story quickly slipped back beneath my radar as it wended its usual slow-cooker way through the judicial system.
Which may explain why I was shocked in late March to learn the judge in the case had acquitted Ryan because, he said, she was under “duress” at the time—even though she had admitted to agreeing to pay an undercover Mountie $25,000 to do the deed.
I wasn’t surprised when I heard, a month later, that the crown had decided to appeal the acquittal, claiming the trial judge had erred in law by failing to consider whether hiring a hit man was a “proportionate” response to whatever duress she was under.
But now that I’ve finally read Justice David Farrar’s 26-page decision, I have no problem with his conclusion. Instead, I have an entirely different problem—and question.
Let’s start with Michael Martin Ryan, He’s a nasty piece of business, “a manipulative, controlling and abusive husband [who] sought at every turn to control the actions of his wife.” He cut her off from family, friends, even co-workers, put a gun to her head on several occasions, threatened to kill her and their daughter, then “dig a trench and put them in and pile garbage on top.” When Ryan suggested a divorce, he warned: “Don’t test me, I will destroy you before I get a divorce.”
When she did finally move out, the threats only intensified. She charged him with uttering threats. The charges were dropped. She called the RCMP nine times, victim services 11 and 9-1-1 once. On February 17, 2008, her husband showed up at her school, sat menacingly in her car. The Mounties were called. They told her it was a civil matter; there was nothing they could do.
Instead, six weeks later, having failed Nicole Ryan at every turn, the RCMP decided to mount an expensive, sophisticated sting operation, using an undercover officer to entrap a desperate, frightened woman into committing a crime for which she could be charged.
Why?
Unfortunately, that question won’t be addressed during the upcoming appeal. But it’s a question that needs to the answered—if not by the Mounties, then certainly by the province’s justice minister.
****
Read the complete decision.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Is Corey Wright the wrong man?
When American sailor Damon Crooks was killed on Argyle Street, police had a strong suspect but a weak case. Luckily for a city embarrassed by the murder, the suspect cooperated. Stephen Kimber finds out how pleading guilty became Corey Wright’s best move, right or wrong.
Corey Wright Photo essay by Aaron Fraser
My blood is my ink
My tears are my tales
I did a couple years in jail
But I shall prevail
He smiled. Big smile. “What you doing after?” It was nudging four in the morning on Saturday, November 4, 2006, closing time at Rain, the downtown Halifax nightclub where Corey Wright had spent his evening. He’d glimpsed her earlier. She served drinks in the bar. Hot. He’d made eye contact. Smiled. She’d smiled back. Now, he chatted her up. Got her name, her number.
“Got to clean up,” she told him.
“Do your thing,” he shrugged. But they agreed, in the way such things are agreed to, that he would wait outside for her.
As he bounced down the steps from the second floor bar to Argyle Street, Corey Wright couldn’t help thinking just how well all the pieces of his life were coming together.
Finally.
He and two friends had spent the early evening hours at Wright’s apartment “chillin’, freestylin’” and drinking a six-pack of Corona, lubrication for their night ahead. At around midnight, they’d made their way downtown to Rain.
Wright had heard that Madd Links, the new host of Black Entertainment Television’s Rap City, and Big Apple, an American-based rapper, would be at the club tonight. He’d printed out a copy of his portfolio, grabbed a couple of his CDs—Vinny Deniroz was his rap name, Hali Hustler the name of his CD—and “got all dolled up and pretty.” Corey Wright was going to make it in the music business, and tonight would be his opportunity to start networking his way to the top.
The night had gone even better than he’d hoped. He’d handed Madd Links his card, inside-joked about the Rap City host’s perceived weaknesses—“How come you don’t rap in the booth?”—and engaged in some similarly familiar chit and chat with Big Apple.
“What you drinking?” he’d asked Apple at one point.
“I’m not a big drinker,” Apple replied.
Wright went over to the bartender anyway. “Send over a couple of drinks,” he said.
Before the two American rappers left for the night, Wright had even gotten a few pictures taken him of himself with them.
Which may explain why he hadn’t been paying attention to the booze-fueled storm brewing inside the club between some visiting American sailors and a group of local blacks, most of them guys Wright knew from the hood. When one of them, the half brother of a buddy, told Wright about a “nice chain” he’d seen around the neck of an American sailor—“I’m gonna take it”—Wright tried to discourage him. “Don’t do that man,” he said. “You got a nice chain too.”
Now, however, Wright spilled out onto Argyle Street and into the messy middle of the seething tension. To his right, familiar faces, friends; to his left, American sailors. Everyone was circling, puffed up, strutting, acting hard.
Wright looked around, then back up the stairs, saw the the woman coming down. “Fuck this,” he thought to himself, “I’m going with her.”
But just then, something happened—who knows what—and people started beating on each other. Someone punched Wright. He swung back. He hit some people, got swarmed. He kicked, punched, fought back. Someone pulled his shirt up over his head. He felt something cold against his skin—a blade! He knew what a knife felt like, knew what it meant. So he “spazzed,” swinging ever more wildly. Down, up, down again. Swallowed by the crowd. On his knees on the sidewalk at one point, he eyed the spoils of battle: scattered wallets, cell phones, watches, even a shoe that had come off in the melee. He grabbed what he could, shoved them in his pockets. Except the shoe. Who needs one shoe?
Finally, he saw his escape. A few of his buddies were inside a nearby car. He jumped in. His hand stung. He looked down. He was bleeding from where the knife had sliced him. Before he could stanch the bleeding, a patrol car pulled up behind them.
“Get out of here,” Wright shouted at the driver.
“No, man,” his friend replied. “We ain’t done nothing.”
Wright knew that wouldn’t matter. I know how it goes. Besides, he was on parole, less than two months away from the end, less than two months from freedom.
From off in the distance, he heard someone shouting, “My friend’s been stabbed…”
He opened the car door, jumped out, ran for it.
***
The murder of Damon Crooks—he’d been stabbed four times, including once through the heart—shocked and appalled Haligonians.
For starters, his killing was just the latest, worst example of the crazily escalating mindless mayhem plaguing downtown Halifax. In June, The Coast had published a cover story about what one criminologist called Halifax’s “dirty little secret,” the reality the city “had the highest violent crime rate among the 17 Canadian cities surveyed.” As if to drive the point home, in the week before the murder the press had reported that four more people had been assaulted in two separate attacks near Pizza Corner, the traditional final pit stop for local late-night bar-hoppers.
To make this murder more reprehensible, the victim, Damon Crooks, was not only a visitor to the city—a 28-year-old US navy Petty Officer 1st Class from the USS Doyle—but also the soon-to-be father of a baby girl.
Not surprisingly, the story of his death had media legs, not only in Canada but also in the United States as well.
As if to atone for the sins of its city, the Chronicle-Herald quickly set up a “Damon Crooks Family Fund” to raise money for the child’s upbringing. The fund would eventually raise $60,000.
In the legislature, opposition leader Darrell Dexter introduced a motion to express Nova Scotians’ “deepest condolences to the family and friends and shipmates of Damon Crooks… and urge that every step be taken to ensure the safe enjoyment of Nova Scotia port cities by the visitors that we welcome to our shores.” The resolution passed unanimously.
Not to be outdone, Halifax mayor Peter Kelly promised to set up what would become the much publicized Mayor’s Task Force on Violence in Halifax.
In death, Damon Crooks became larger-than-life. His shipmates claimed his only role in the brawl had been as unlucky good Samaritan—coming to the aid of a sailor friend whose necklace had been ripped from his neck.
“He was a great man, a great person,” his grieving fiancee told CTV News. “He’s really going to be missed.”
***
If this narrative now had its hero, it also needed a villain.
Corey Wright—initially charged with first degree murder—fit that role perfectly. He’d been arrested within minutes of the stabbing fleeing the scene of the crime. Damon Crooks’ wallet was in his pocket. And he had a history of knife violence.
In 2002, Wright had been convicted of aggravated assault in connection with the stabbing of a man and his girlfriend. Despite the prosecutor’s plea that Wright be locked up for 12 years, the judge sentenced him to just five and a half years, which—thanks to time credited for the period he’d spent in jail before his trial and a positive recommendation from the parole board—meant Wright was on the streets, on parole, when Crooks was murdered.
That, predictably, transformed Corey Wright—described as an “unpredictable psychopath” and a “knife-wielding maniac”—into the poster boy for a justice system run amuck.
“If [the judge] had listened to a crown attorney two-and-a-half years ago,” thundered David Rodenhiser in the Halifax Daily News, “Corey Wright would still be safely behind bars in a federal penitentiary and Damon Crooks might still be alive and looking forward to the birth of his first child.”
Rodenhiser’s guilty-as-charged diatribe —widely shared—came just three days after Damon Crooks’ murder, one day after Corey Wright’s arraignment, and years before the facts of the case against Wright could be argued in court!
And yet…
Corey Wright was not without his supporters. During his second of many courtroom appearances, the court house filled with family and friends. Some handed out flyers showing a photo of “a beaming [Wright] with a toothy grin… cradling his newborn son” with the words: “Society Please Don’t Condemn A Man To Life Because Of His Past” and “Help An Innocent Black Man Accused By Halifax Police.” Others chanted, “Free Vinny D!” as sheriff’s deputies escorted the shackled Wright from the courtroom.
“He’s innocent,” a family member told reporters. “He said he didn’t do it.” Added a neighbour: “Corey is one of the sweetest guys I have ever known.”
***
I wouldn’t be this strong if it wasn’t for my moms
Discipline, dedication, determination and honour
This is what she taught me
Same for my stepfather
Corey Wright, named after his biological father, was born in Halifax on April 25, 1983, the middle of Valerie Wright’s three sons. His parents split when he was very young, and he never had a relationship with his father. He was raised instead by his mother. She calls him DeeWan.
“My mother was great,” Wright says from his prison cell today. “Growing up… I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
When he was 15, however, he got into “an altercation with my mother that changed my life.” It was, he admits now, a stupid teenager-thing. That morning, Corey was rushing around, late for school—“I had tests that day in math, in science, an essay due in English, and I always did things last minute”—when he saw his younger brother, Marvin, in the living room. Lounging around. Still in his pajamas.
“Get ready for school,” Corey ordered him.
“I’m not going,” Marvin replied.
“What do you mean, you’re not going?” One thing led to another and “I clipped him in the back of the head. He went all dramatic, crying to my mother and such.”
His mother admonished Corey not to hit his brother.
“Why do you worry about him?” Corey shot back. “You don’t worry about me.”
“As soon as I said it,” he says today, “I knew I was wrong. I hurt her feelings.”
Valerie lashed back, “slapping and hitting me” with little effect.
“I was smiling. I couldn’t help it,” Wright remembers. “But then she’s all, ‘Get out! Get out! Don’t come back!’”
Today, he shakes his head. “It was pride, stupid pride.” Corey stormed out, didn’t come back.
He ended up couch surfing. “I had three aunts and two best friends, so that was five couches and I just kept moving…” He stopped going to school. “I started smoking weed but I didn’t have any money.” One morning, one of his best friends showed up at the apartment where he was staying and began “to count his money. I figured he was selling weed, so I says, ‘Let me sell some too.’ And he says, ‘No, I don’t sell weed. I sell crack.’ And I thought, screw it, I’ll try it. I sold crack so I could smoke weed.”
He was 16.
Selling crack cocaine wasn’t just illegal; it was dangerous.
One night in July 2000, one of his best friends, Tyrone Oliver, who’d also allegedly been selling drugs, was gunned down on an outdoor basketball court. After that, Wright, in the words of his parole officer, would “drink the ‘hard stuff’ and continue to ingest alcohol until he could not drink any more.”
He was scared, but he wasn’t about to show it.
“I was always a fighter, you know, I was this skinny, short kid, but I loved to fight, especially the bigger guys who picked on the little kids or girls,” Wright says today. “When you’re a teenager, fighting is fun.” It’s less fun when others are carrying guns. “I’d never carry a gun,” Wright insists. “Guns make me nervous. But I got a knife. For protection.”
It was the knife that got him into trouble. In the early morning hours of April 20, 2002, he went to a birthday party at an after-hours spot on Gottingen Street, where he ended up dancing with a girl who turned out to be someone’s girlfriend.
“Why you hitting on my girlfriend?”
“I’m not hitting on your girlfriend.”
Words led to words, and the other guy went outside to get something from his car. “’Hold on,’ he said to me, ‘I’ll be right back.’” He returned moments later. “I’m trying to leave and he says, ‘I got something for you.’… I thought he had a gun. I panicked. I pulled out my knife and started swinging.” Wright stabbed the guy 14 times and, when the guy’s girlfriend tried to intervene, he cut her too. Today, he shakes his head. “He didn’t even have a gun on him.”
Wright pled guilty to the assault—“Your lordship,” he told the judge at his sentencing, “I acknowledge what I done wrong, and the weight of my sins is greater than I can bear”—and began, it seemed, to turn his life around.
***
But I’m gonna rise to the occasion
I’m driven by my ambition
While in jail, Wright earned his GED high school equivalency and enrolled in Second Chance, a one-year program to provide entrepreneurial skills to young people who’d been in “conflict with the law.”
Wright had already launched his own small business, opening up a north end storefront with his mother—with whom he’d reconciled—and one of his brothers. “We’d go out to Costco and buy in bulk—toothpaste, coffee, jerseys—and sell them in the neighbourhood” to people who couldn’t afford transportation to shop themselves.
He and a friend also got into the party promotion business. “We’d pay for the flyers—$40 for a thousand—and organize the shows. The club would get the bar; we’d get the door. We made a lot of money.” But then they got burned in a deal with a San Francisco promoter who was supposed to do in a show in Halifax and didn’t, and Wright and his partner “decided to go our separate ways.”
Wright’s separate way was to begin making his own music. When he was still selling crack, he remembers going to a house party and seeing some kids he’d grown up with performing, pretending to be the gangsters he actually was. “I saw these guys rapping what I’m doing, but they weren’t really doing it. They were going to school. They were good kids. So I thought, I’ll give rapping a try. At least I’m doing it.”
Wright ended up at Village Sound, Stephen Outhit’s north end recording studio. “He was an exceptionally talented rapper,” Outhit recalls, and he remembers being equally impressed by Wright the person. “He wasn’t a thuggy, peer-pressured kind of guy. He was a smart businessman who’d been born in an unfortunate situation.”
Outhit’s encouragement “put something in me,” Wright acknowledges. “I thought, this guy doesn’t know me and he’s saying I’m good. Maybe I can do this.” He made a CD, got a manager, made plans for a tour. “Two thousand and seven,” Wright says wistfully. “That year was going to be my dream, going to be all music for me.”
And then, on the morning of November 4, 2006, the dream became a nightmare.
***
Well at least my pain
Is more than a rhyme to me
How can I complain
When he’s doing more time than me
From the beginning, there were questions about what really happened outside Rain that night. Even about what had started it. A fight over a girl? A chain?
Although the circumstantial case against Corey Wright was compelling, even overwhelming—he was caught running for the crime scene with blood on his hand and the victim’s wallet in his possession—there was little hard evidence to connect him to the actual murder. It had happened in the confusing middle of a sprawling brawl involving, by some accounts, more than two dozen participants. Virtually every one of them—not to mention non-combatant witnesses—was intoxicated, their memories fogged, their evidence unreliable. Some, perhaps understandably, weren’t keen to talk to the police.
Within hours of the incident, however, a very different narrative began circulating in the black community. Someone else, also black, had murdered Damon Crooks—and bragged about it. The alleged killer had a well-known fetish for knives and for other people’s gold chains. The night before the murder, or so the story went, the man had stabbed someone else and taken his gold chain. Valerie Wright began compiling affidavits to show her son was not Crooks’ killer. It wasn’t easy. Everyone, it seemed, was scared of the other guy.
According to emails between the Crown lawyers and police, detectives knew soon after the murder that “someone else confessed to the murder to a third party.” What police did with that information isn’t clear.
They certainly had the information from several sources. The summer after the murder, for example, Stephen Outhit, the producer who’d befriended Corey, wrote to mayor Kelly expressing his concerns about delays in the case, as well as explaining that he’d been told that someone else—he named the individua—had allegedly confessed to the crime. Kelly wrote back, “essentially thanked me for my letter and said he’d forwarded it to the police,” Outhit explains. “The police never contacted me about it.”
He says he knows several other people contacted Crimestoppers with similar information, but were never contacted either.
The crown’s case against Corey Wright was no slam dunk. Within months, the crown had reduced his first degree murder charge to second degree, and eventually settled for manslaughter. Wright’s preliminary hearing, which had been scheduled to run for 20 days, lasted only five. The case had dragged on for close to a two and a half years when, in March 2009, on the edge of the beginning of his trial, Wright surprised everyone by changing his plea to guilty of manslaughter.
To understand just how big a surprise—not to mention relief—Wright’s plea must have been for prosecutors, it’s instructive to read Justice Felix Cacchione written judgment.
“Having reviewed the evidence in this case,” he noted at Wright’s sentencing hearing, addressing his comments to Crooks’ family, “I can say to you with certainty that this case was not an open and shut case of either murder or manslaughter. The crown acknowledged to me the difficulty that it would have in proving the charge as originally laid… It is very possible that a jury hearing the evidence that the prosecution had available to it could have decided that they either could not decide who did what and hence… been hung as a jury… Or the jury could in all likelihood have had a reasonable doubt that Mr. Wright was the offender who caused Damon Crooks’ death.”
The flimsiness of the crown’s case was not the only surprise on sentencing day. The crown and defence lawyers told the judge they’d agreed on a joint sentencing recommendation: 15 years for manslaughter.
In the complicated ways of the criminal justice system, that meant Wright typically would have been credited with double the time he’d already spent in jail while awaiting trial, reducing his actual sentence to 10 years. And—normally—he would have been entitled to apply for parole after serving just one-third of his sentence, meaning he would have been eligible to apply for parole after roughly three and a half years in prison.
Instead, Cacchione—“mindful of society’s abhorrence of what occurred and the prevalence of these types of activities in our community”—allowed Wright to claim just four years of remand time instead of five and ordered that “you serve at least half the sentence before you are considered eligible for parole. That means, sir, that on the 11-year sentence you will have to serve five-and-a-half years before you can even apply for parole.”
***
Lookin’ in the mirror
when I’m all by my lonesome
Pictures getting clearer
Play the cards that I’m holding
Pornographic magazine keeps me with a pin up
But it’s the pen and pad that keeps me with my chin up
Still unsigned so they think I’m a beginner
But it’s my inner that’s telling me I’m a winner
“Do you mind if I turn on the tape recorder?” I ask. We are sitting in a small windowless room inside the Springhill Institution, the prison where Corey Wright is serving his sentence. It’s the first time I’ve met Wright. But I’ve been following his story almost from the beginning.
As a columnist for the Daily News, I’d written about the media rush-to-judgment after it was revealed that Wright had been on parole at the time of Crooks’ killing. I’d spoken to Outhit, who believed an injustice might have been done, and to Valerie Wright, Corey’s mother, who was his number one and, seemingly, sometimes his only defender. I’d followed the case as it worked its way through the courts.
After Wright’s sentencing, we’d begun an email and letter correspondence. “I really want to share my story, the trials and tribulations I have gone through,” he wrote at one point. “I’ve done a lot of wrong things, but who hasn’t?... I always knew when I was doing wrong, but I am not and was never a bad person… Sorry for talking about my past,” he added, “but everyone new I meet I try to shed light on me as a person. Just because the newspapers and the media painted me out to be something I’m not. Well, anyway, we will talk soon, I hope.”
Now we sit, face to face, both eying the tape recorder between us. Wright is a handsome young man with an easy smile, the slight gap between his front teeth making him seem more boyish than his 26 years. The intelligence that’s obvious in his conversation serves as a counterpoint to the muscles he’s been building, lifting weights in prison, and to his tattoos: there’s one on the back of each hand containing the names of each of his two young sons and another on his shoulder that declares he is “My Brother’s Keeper.”
“It depends,” he says finally in response to my question about the tape recorder. “How honest do you want me to be?” We don’t turn on the tape recorder.
The issue, it turns out, is practical—as was his decision last spring to plead guilty to manslaughter. He hadn’t been impressed by the performance of his lawyer, Warren Zimmer, during the preliminary hearing. “He just took my case for the publicity,” Wright argues. “I’m at the police station [after his arrest] and a cop says to me, ‘You’ve got a call.’ It was Warren. He told me he was going to fight for me. I take people at their word. But we did the preliminary and he wasn’t fighting. Some days he wasn’t even there.”
Which is why, about a month before his trial was scheduled to begin, Wright asked to speak to Zimmer. He’d been thinking about his prospects in court and about what a long stretch in prison could mean to his dream of a music career. “I’ve got a bright future,” he tells me today. “I can feel it. I’m destined for something. Give me a pen and a roll of toilet paper and I can make rhymes… Doesn’t matter where I am. I can do time. But I can’t do forever…
“So I said to him, ‘Honestly Warren, this is my life. Be straight with me. What are my chances?’ And he says, ‘Well, it’s 50–50.’ So a coin toss is going to determine my life. I said, ‘Warren, go to them, get them to drop it to manslaughter…’ And that’s what happened.”
After he went to jail, Wright appealed Cacchione’s decision to reduce his remand credit and force him to serve more time before he would be eligible for parole. Just last month, the appeal court reversed those conditions. Which means Wright can now apply for parole in 2012 instead of 2014.
Which may be one more reason Corey Wright isn’t keen to go on the record, arguing he didn’t kill Damon Crooks. Call it the Donald Marshall, Jr., conundrum. Marshall famously spent 11 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, unable to get parole because he refused to admit his guilt, and therefore, according to the parole board, wasn’t ready to be rehabilitated.
Wright’s situation is different, of course. He did plead guilty to being responsible for Crooks’ death.
But did he really do it?
There are those who remain convinced Corey Wright is innocent.
While Wright answers most of my questions about the events of the night of November 4, 2006, he steers clear of the key question about whether he stabbed Crooks.
“I can’t talk about that,” he tells me.
It would be easy to take from that that Wright is guilty. But he is also—not to put too fine a point on it—someone who understands the justice system well enough to know guilt and innocence often matter less than luck and cunning.
Having been branded for a stabbing he admits he did commit, what were his chances of getting a jury’s benefit of the doubt if he was on trial for something he actually didn’t do? And, if he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison?
Corey Wright would rather not go there. He can do the time he’s been given.
He fills his days working on his rhymes. Whenever he has something ready, he sets up a phone call with James McQuaid, aka Homegrown, his Halifax-based producer. While Wright raps to the beat of an unrelated song playing from his CD player into his earphones, McQuaid records Wright’s voice over the telephone and later marries it to a beat in his studio.
Wright says his new music is very different from his earlier, more gangsta-inspired raps. “It’s like a different me,” he says. “It’s more party, more chill. I’m now more conscious, more motivational.”
Corey Wright still dreams. Destiny calls. We turn on the recorder. He raps:
You be waiting a long time
If you think I’m going to fade out
Not in this lifetime
Check my lifeline
Known for the gap in my teeth
And writing nice rhymes…
Corey Wright laughs, shows the gap in his teeth.
Stephen Kimber, The Coast’s Senior Features Writer, is the author of eight books. He teaches journalism at the University of King’s College.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Protecting privacy or covering up?
So whose privacy are they protecting?
On Dec. 2, 2008, an RCMP constable shot and killed John Andrew Simon, a member of Cape Breton’s Wagmatcook First Nation. Simon, everyone agrees, was alone inside his house, drunk and suicidal, at the time he was killed. According to what police reportedly told Simon’s family, he was unarmed, sitting on the toilet and smoking a cigarette when Cst. Jeremy Frenette first entered the house. They claim Simon then fled to the kitchen where he grabbed his shotgun. Frenette fired three times, killing Simon.
What was Cst. Frenette doing inside the house without a warrant? And without backup? Especially considering that Simon, at that point, was no threat to anyone except himself.
The Halifax Regional Police, who led what was supposed to be an arms-length investigation into the shooting, concluded he only fired “after reasonably perceiving that John Simon posed a threat of grievous bodily harm or death and believing that he could not otherwise preserve himself from grievous bodily harm other than by using deadly force.”
Simon’s widow and members of the local band council would beg to disagree.
But that’s not the issue here.
Why are the Mounties now refusing to release the report into the incident? Just as importantly, why is it even the RCMP’s call whether to release this supposedly independent review?
RCMP Chief Supt. Blair McKnight told reporters in December the Mounties weren’t “permitted” to release the report under Canada’s privacy laws.
Whose privacy is being protected here? Simon himself is dead. His widow and the local band council—which contract the RCMP to police their reserve—both say they want to read a copy of the report.
Others have seen it. Nova Scotia’s Justice Minister, Ross Landry, for example—himself a former RCMP officer—told reporters this week he has read the report and believes the band council should too before he makes his decision on their request for a public inquiry into Simon’s death. His office, in fact, is trying to help the band get a copy.
But RCMP brass seem happy to hide the report behind the privacy veil.
Little wonder the Wagmatcook band council has decided to replace the RCMP when its policing contract expires at the end of next month. Little wonder too that the council has called for a public inquiry to determine why “policing hasn’t changed in our First Nation territories” in the two decades since the Marshall Inquiry report.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and eight non-fiction books.