What an Experience

 

 

 

Comments.    Considerations.     Questions.

         

                      by Kenneth Bagnell

 

     Kenneth Pennington, a highly respected scholar of the law and its history -– he’s authored many books and is on the faculty of The Catholic University of America — wrote a highly insightful essay a few years ago. Its title is “Innocent Until Proven Guilty: the Origin of a Legal Maxim.” It came back to me the other day, because of its point of view and a current and painful Canadian incident. I felt it spoke to that incident. Dr. Pennington wrote that, in his view, the original view of a person being innocent until proven guilty, has been eviscerated. As he put it: “In American law, it has become a notion, an assumption, with very little content.”

       Canada has just been both an example and a witness to that truth. I refer to the treatment given to a highly reputable Canadian, John Furlong, who acquired national respect for his role as CEO of Canada’s 2010 winter Olympics. Then, about three years ago, out of nowhere, he was flagrantly accused of that dreadful crime: sexual abuse of young people. In the end he was proven innocent. But the harm had happened: his reputation was soiled, his spirit all but broken.

     A brief overview will establish the situation that enveloped and defamed him. He was born in Ireland, immigrated to British Columbia in the early 1970s and settled in the town of Burns Lake. His life career was mainly in sports, in which he won numerous awards, including a national squash championship. He also taught aboriginal classes, (voluntarily) in Burns Lake during the late 1960s. In time he was chosen for various leadership posts, including chairing Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics. Suddenly, in 2013, three women filed civil lawsuits claiming he had sexually abused them while teaching in school at Burns Lake. As a friend and colleague Gary Mason, a Globe & Mail columnist who cooperated with him on his memoir, Patriot Games, put it:  “One day you wake up to find yourself confronting the most odious allegation imaginable — that you sexually abused native children.”

    To sum it up, as of now: in March, the whole assault on John Furlong was revealed as invalid because it was false: (a) one accuser had already collected payment from the Residential Schools Settlement, based on an incident he insisted happened at a different town at the time he claimed he was abused in Burns Lake. His claim was thereby dismissed as false. (Moreover he had well over 30 convictions for fraud, theft, forgery and other misdemeanors.) (b) A second claimant, this time a woman, withdrew her accusation and abandoned her claim after her own lawyer, obviously skeptical and frustrated, withdrew from her case. (C) the third, a woman, was shown to have made a false claim, exposed as such by the judge who told her in court that she wasn’t ever even at the Burn’s Lake school where she alleged the incident took place. As the Supreme Court justice put it, she didn’t “ever attend Immaculata.”  (So what was achieved? (A) One accuser didn’t even attend the school where the false allegations were said to have took place. (B) Another simply quit the case. (C) The last proceeding was ditched after the accuser, with 50 or so criminal convictions, didn’t even show up. What a botch. How come the pretrial investigation didn’t turn this up and thereby dismiss the trial?       

     There’s cost and not just to the public purse. There’s another: the deepening caution among some men as to serving in certain youth programs, given the dreadful experience like the one Mr. Furlong suffered. Too many men think what happened to him could happen to them. So they say no thank you to Boy Scouting, Sunday School teaching, Camp leadership and so on. Yes of course they may well be “worry warts” but I understand their attitude. They’re more and more cautious living by the code of “take-no-chances.”  Mr. Furlong’s experience may well live a very long time in the male memory so that increasingly, women will become more evident as Scout leaders.

       The costs to John Furlong, emotionally and financially, left him broken in spirit. His legal fees could stretch well beyond his financial resources. He told a friend he’d been “numb for months, trying my best to cope….” Sad indeed and it was worsened by an incident overseas in April, 2013, when his wife, Debra, was killed in a car accident, hence never to know her husband was innocent and cleared as such. In a statement after it was all over Furlong said he didn’t attend the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi, set in the Russian south, for fear the media attention he’d get because of what he faced would divert attention from the coverage the athletes deserved. “I have been deeply depressed for many months,” said the statement his lawyer read aloud. “As for my family there has been nothing more important for me than trying to clear my name and re-establish my reputation and career. An almost unimaginable nightmare that my family and I endured for years has finally ended…. As long, painful and paralyzing as this has been, I am glad that truth and innocence have prevailed.” Finally he spoke to his accusers, none of whom were present. “I wish them no harm,” he said, “and I hope they will go on and find inner peace. They will have to live with what they have done and I hope they will do better…”  What an experience.      

 

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All my past blogs are archived on my website: your comments are welcome here: www.kennethbagnell.com.