Stolen Life

by Rudy Wiebe

  Answer: I wouldn’t say “only expect.” One always hopes that what is believable and what is just to all concerned are the same thing.

  [One hopes.]

  The trial of Yvonne Johnson and Ernest Jensen began on 4 March 1991 in the Wetaskiwin Court of Queen’s Bench before the Honourable Madame Justice Nina L. Foster—who had already tried Dwayne—and a selected jury. The charge against the two remained first-degree murder to which they pleaded “Not Guilty.” The Crown’s case against Yvonne rested primarily on the testimony of Lyle Schmidt and Shirley Anne Salmon, though they were both, to state it in the acceptable legal language of the defence lawyers, witnesses whose credibility “was greatly at issue.”

  Instead of pleading “Not Guilty” to one of the severest charges in the Canadian criminal code, why did Yvonne and Ernie not plead “Guilty,” as Dwayne and Shirley Anne had, to a lesser charge such as manslaughter or even second-degree murder? According to Brian Beresh, he and Ernie’s defence lawyer, Glen Allen, had several discussions with Crown Prosecutor Hill and Judge Foster to accept a plea of “Guilty” to manslaughter. But Beresh remembers Hill as having “a punitive attitude” towards both the accused, and towards Yvonne in particular. He recalls: “The judge was on our side in this matter but Hill would not budge.” And without his agreement no change of charge was possible.

  Hill was also adamant that Yvonne and Ernie’s trial must be by jury as well as judge. It seemed to Beresh that Hill felt that such a brutal crime—beating to death an almost complete stranger—should “be judged by the community.” Beresh and Glen Allen had at first elected to go with a judge and jury because, like all defence lawyers, they were apprehensive about having a hard-nosed judge preside over the trial. But when they learned that Judge Foster was to preside, a magistrate well known for her fairness and understanding, they requested a re-election to a trial by judge only. But Hill “would not back off” and allow re-election.

  The defence lawyers had good reason to be apprehensive about defending such a widely discussed murder before a Wetaskiwin district jury. One of the accused was Native, and racial and social difficulties with the Hobbema reserves were well known. Also, Native people rarely accept jury duty, especially when a Native person is one of the accused. Generally speaking, they do not wish to sit in judgement on one of their own people, nor do they like to be seen as cooperting with a legal system that is so often pitted against them. To add to this, the area, which includes the densely populated, farming- and oil-based communities of Leduc, Camrose, Thorsby, Ponaka, and many others, is seen as deeply conservative, and a Bible belt of Christian practice and morality.

  At every turn, then, the letter of the law as enforced by the Prosecutor, seemed to leave Yvonne no choice.

  Besides the trauma of the trial itself, Yvonne faced several difficulties. By March 1991 she had been in prison for eighteen months. She writes: “I saw Xmas activities through the window bars of Remand for two years. I watched the people moving on the streets in dress for Klondike days. I lived through a strike there.” Her three children were living together in one foster family, and if the charge had been minor, she would have simply said, “Yes. Guilty,” and hidden and endured until she was let out.

  As a child she had been trained and beaten to play the shadow, to be a rubber doll or an emotionless statue and take everything done to her; or to cry and so perhaps avoid somehow whatever brutal thing was happening to her. As an adult she had sometimes tried to evade problems either by fighting physically, with rage the only acceptable emotion, or by running away, or by hiding behind a bottle and all “the false bullshit and dreams” she could convince herself into. In short, from her cell in the Remand Centre she had come to consider the first twenty-seven years of her life to have been one jagged sequence of “ducking, hiding, dodging, diving, lying, fighting, running.”

  But none of these strategies was possible now. She would be taken to Wetaskiwin in chains—walk or be carried, it made little difference to officials—and the rest of her life would be decided for her.

  The question remained: why not leave the Edmonton Remand Centre dead? Perhaps it was born-again Christianity, the moments of consolation she found in being convinced she was “saved.” “Christianity,” she would write later, “fooled me so well in prison for a while. It saved me from facing a lot of my reality.”

  But there was something more: her looming past which she could not yet order in her mind, nor speak of in any sequence of words because she did not yet know how to turn towards it; and if she could have so turned, it would have been impossible for her yet to face. Nevertheless it was there, and a small articulation of it began in the image of a poem she wrote on 16 June 1990:

  There’s a hole left in my soul

  Where I fear to go.

  There, once, a child should have lived.

  Instead anger and hatred moved in.

  They smothered the child

  with filth and guilt.

  In April 1993, I first talked to Brian Beresh in Edmonton several times on the telephone; he was efficiently courteous and professional, he returned my calls, he invited me to meet him in his office and gave me various boxes he had, full of the court records. At that time, the case was still before the Alberta Court of Appeal and, as he said, the decision was taking very long. But he would be happy to talk to me about it; it was, he said, “one of the saddest cases I’ve ever had.”

  It stands in the court record that Beresh requested that Yvonne’s trial be severed from Ernie’s, but Judge Foster’s first ruling in the trial was: “I am not convinced that there is a need for severance. I will deal with that problem when it arises.” As Beresh explained to me, severance is very difficult to get in cases where two persons are accused of the same crime. The law generally holds they should be tried together. Beresh also applied for a change of venue, largely due to the “emotive” language used by the local press, and that request also was rejected. Beresh then decided that his trial strategy would be to call no witnesses whatever: his defence would consist of his cross-examination of Crown witnesses.

  As Beresh indicated to me later, he had an “ethical obligation” not to call witnesses who he thought might prove to be “unreliable.” There are two different rules of professional conduct that he may be hinting at here: one is the “ethical” rule that you cannot call a witness who you believe will not tell the truth; the other is a rule of good practice, which is not to call a witness if you don’t know what he will say, or how he will stand up to cross-examination.

  “I had lots of good reasons,” Beresh insists, and so no one was called to the stand to testify on Yvonne’s behalf, or to challenge or contradict any of the statements made about her and her actions. Nor could she testify herself. Like her ancestor Big Bear at his trial for treason-felony in 1885, she did not speak a word in her own defence.

  When I asked Beresh why he had not put Yvonne on the stand, he gave me two reasons. The first was that the two co-accused “agreed that neither would testify.”

  It is conventional wisdom, in trials with co-accused, that there is nothing a Crown attorney likes better than to have the two defendants pointing a finger at each other. Good legal advice would involve advising your clients of the fact that they could sink each other—either because their memories vary, or because they may implicate each other by finger-pointing on the stand. Unless their stories are congruent or mutually supportive, they can have a negative effect on the jury. Given the confusion and violence in that basement room, Yvonne and Ernie might remember things quite differently. And from his erratic comments in the cell shot, there was no telling what Ernie might say on the stand.

  The second reason Beresh gave me for not wanting Yvonne to testify was “Yvonne does not present well, [she] does not look too good.”

  Yvonne herself says that at the time of the trial, “I was just totally shut down.” Even in June 1997, she wrote of her reactions at that time in the third person.

  After the first day o
f the trial her lawyer told Yvonne, Try to smile a little bit, you look so hard. Yvonne either tried to hide behind her hair or find one spot in which to stare. Just sit like a zombie. She told her lawyer she did not want to go back into court, it could just go on without her, as her face being there just gave them an Indian face to judge and sneer at, she could say or do nothing anyway.

  It seems quite possible that a Wetaskiwin jury would have been unsympathetic to the kind of woman she presented herself as at the trial.

  In the end, Beresh said, a court decision depends on what the jury accepts. And the jury in this case was “mostly White men, local people.” In fact, they were all White, nine of them men.

  The jury of twelve Wetaskiwin Judicial District citizens retired to deliberate at 11:53 a.m. on 19 March; they returned to the courtroom at 1:42 p.m. on 20 March. Despite all defence cross-examination to the contrary, and despite Brian Beresh’s concluding address, in which he emphasized that there was no credible evidence of intent to kill on Yvonne’s part, and no evidence linking her to the injuries that caused Skwarok’s death, the jury found Lyle Schmidt and Shirley Anne Salmon most believable witnesses. They also ignored Beresh’s assertion that Yvonne could be guilty of nothing worse than manslaughter. Yvonne remembers:

  They came back with the verdict on me first. Unanimous, Guilty as Charged, first-degree murder, life, twenty-five years without parole. As they did, Ernie hit the floor, but I remained standing. And for the first and only time I looked each of the jurors in the eye; wondering, did they really feel better human beings for this, or self-righteous as some of their looks would say. Then came Ernie’s verdict; guilty of second-degree murder. After a short break, the judge asked if ten years before possible parole was good enough, or more?

  They returned, saying ten was good enough, life-ten.

  Then the judge sentenced us in one final swoop. Like a drop from the gallows.

  I thought I’d comfort Ernie, he must be feeling it all, as I did. I told him, It’s okay, if you look around, others got it worse than you. His reply was, “I won’t get laid for a long time.”

  Throughout the trial, one source of support for Yvonne had been Cecilia and other family members who sat in court every day. On 21 March 1991 The Edmonton Journal reported: “Two relatives of Yvonne Johnson ran from a Wetaskiwin courtroom in tears after a jury convicted her of first-degree murder […]. Johnson wiped away tears but remained relatively composed after the verdict and sentence.”

  12

  The Power of my Name: Why I Must Remember This

  It’s confusing, it takes a lot of thinking to put it into some sort of—realism, some sort of life structure, something that says I was other than this. That I had some other life prior to this […]. And how I could have lived and had memories … without recalling this. It [did] come back in dreams. But they were such horrific dreams that I didn’t think that they were possible. In my healing process, in dealing with things and the memories coming back, I realize that they weren’t hideous dreams. That they were actual things that happened to me.

  –Yvonne at trial proceedings,

  North Battleford courtroom, 21 June 1995

  SNOW FALLING, lying flat outside my window. It’s not real snow, it’s just bits of white falling, a white space, and then a stone wall beyond my barred window. No rocks, no trees, no stubble or grass like there should be sticking out of it. And there is never darkness inside these walls, only floodlights all the time, lights brighter than ever with snow blinding the sky. I haven’t seen stars for months. I came in spring, the end of April sometime, to the Kingston Prison for Women, and there must have been summer too, and fall, and now my first Christmas in Ontario has come, 1991. And snow is falling.

  I have lots of time to watch it drift down against the grey limestone-concrete walls that go up into black. There is something black over me, like a huge trapdoor—and I can’t move it. It’s not my sentence, I can feel that in the hard walls around me, but something black made blacker by the sharp line of endless lights.

  No one is allowed into the prison yard at night. If I serve my full sentence in P4W, I will possibly not see a star in the sky until 2014.

  I work every morning as a general service barrier cleaner: I swab down the floors, doors, and bars with cleaner, and for two hours in the afternoon I go to school, writing and math. My nights are long, but also short-lived, and the nightmares that woke Dwa beside me in Wetaskiwin are beginning to come again. My bed here is made of steel, with a thin mattress.

  I’m glad I’m not on the range any more. The range cells are like cages, six feet by nine; you can hardly turn around and you face tall windows across a wide corridor and can’t see anything coming unless you angle a hand mirror—if you’ve got one—through the bars of your door. In the newer wings (they had to add these because more women are being sentenced to longer terms in Canada), the cells open onto an inner corridor and each cell has its own outside window. Mine faces a wall, but a small pane in it opens and a little real air can come in. The ranges are noisier, nastier—yells and shouting really echo around stone and steel—but I’m here for life, so after four months of range they placed me in the Wing, where it’s quiet, and private.

  That’s funny—how private I am, will be—hardly funny. I’m one for the record books: the only Native woman in Canada currently serving a twenty-five-year sentence for first-degree murder.

  Two women near me are together, getting involved with each other. I can hear them tonight louder than usual. A place like this breeds a new kind of woman; they’re driven to anything, maybe as a last-ditch try to hold onto humanness. An act of sex may be the only free relationship you can have in here, and I don’t know, when will it be my turn? I don’t want that. But it’s a reality behind bars, so it’s acceptable; it’s more or less expected. The women here have to find a new way of thinking, to live; they fear to act human, but who knows what that means in here, and so some keep trying. The guards can hear and see them of course, but do nothing. If they listen, it’s just to tell each other ugly stories, and laugh.

  Older women lifers usually have photo albums: of the years—family, friends, places—before, and then the years inside. They literally age before you in the seconds it takes to riffle through the pages, a reality they never talk about. I have no mirror hanging in my cell, because prison time lies so heavy on the mind and spirit I can see my age in the face of everyone around me. Women age faster in prison than men. A woman’s body is made differently, and it deals with doing time differently. If you imprison what women are, what they were created for, they age very fast. Especially their sensuality and tenderness, their warmth; the world slots women into a certain kind of sexuality, and prison forces that to the extreme; a woman walking out of prison is a shell of woman, mother, lover, whatever it is to be female.

  Men in prison worry about getting laid when they get out; women worry if they’ll ever be loved again. Or capable of giving it. Many men pump so much iron they look better—like Leon, and with his hair cut—when they come out than when they went in. They’ll say, “When I get out I’m gonna fuck everything that moves.” and with men that’s permitted, they expect it of each other. They expect to go back to their woman, or find another one, who’s cared for their kids, who’ll care for them—but women can never expect that. If a woman has borne children, they’ll have been adopted away into foster homes; if she screws around like men do she’s just a whore, and worse than any because she’s done heavy time. A woman on parole can’t run wild like a man because her children will suffer. Men generally don’t care about their kids, in fact a lot of men brag they don’t even know how many kids they have, leave alone where they are. Who cares—some woman, somewhere, is taking care of them.

  A woman in prison can never think of her children that way. Her soul is full of grief and guilt towards them—are they suffering abuse, like she suffered it?—to keep insanity at bay she has to shut down. She’s isolated, no lover, no motherhood. She ages fast int
o something dry; hard; shrivelled.

  The reality of sex in a prison is, I think, very different for women than for men. There are, of course, homosexual people in both kinds of prisons, but beyond them, for male inmates sex is often connected with power games, protection, lust, dominance. For women it is more often a matter of loneliness, a need for affection, of feeling worthless. Women are the caregivers in any family; intimacy and tenderness is how they understand themselves, and when they’re cut off from everyone they know in the completely controlled space of a prison, they mostly feel like less than nothing.

  A prison for women breeds confusion, there’s so much nothing to hold on to, and when you have lockdown, as they often do to us for any reason, which they may explain or may not—and you never know for how long, nobody knows—you just sit in your cell, alone, perhaps twenty-four hours after twenty-four hours. That’s when you feel the years your arms have already been and continue to be empty.

  And yet, I can’t remember when in prison—I’ve been in over two years straight—when I’ve had the heart and body release of a good, complete cry. Sometimes there’s a small sound, my nose runs, but whatever comes out is anger; it builds up, so I hold myself down, and I wake up with my pillow wet. Tears shed but useless. The door slams on my cell—I call it my house, with a note on the bars which says “Don’t shake my cage.” The door slams on my mind. What can a person think for twenty-five years?

  By law they must keep our bodies alive in here, but what will we be when we’re released? The human need for kindness, grace—it’s impossible in prison. How can you ask for pity? All you do is try to shut down. Solitary is nowhere but inside your own head; and finally you really end up in there: your head only. I told an older girl cousin once what my grandfather was doing to me in Butte when I was four years old, but I didn’t remember exactly what all he did, only that Mom kicked old “Fightin’ Louie” Johnson out of the house as soon as she found out how he made me play with him for candy. And I remember once when I was even younger than four, I think, when I was tied to someone in a “sixty-nine” position, my ankles tied to this other person’s wrists and my wrists to the other person’s ankles. I don’t remember doing anything, but now I recognize it as arousal. I cannot help but think. It lives on inside my head.