Warning: Graphic content follows.In a Toronto courtroom exactly a year ago, a forensic pathologist on the witness stand at a first-degree murder trial showed a slide — projected on the screen and magnified — of the victim’s external genitalia. An excised scrap of flesh from the clitoris to the anus.Rigat Ghirmay was reduced to her most intimate body parts. It was the most cruelly invasive, demeaning post-mortem evidence I’ve ever seen in decades of covering trials. And court had already been shown photographs of Ghirmay’s dismembered corpse: her buttocks, her bisected torso, her long leg bones.I was apparently the only person present outraged by the display. It was utterly unnecessary, exposing Ghirmay’s private parts in open court. The pathologist could draw no conclusion as to whether the woman had been subjected to sexual trauma before or after death. There was no relevance to that specific piece of forensic evidence.Ghirmay was a 24-year-old Black woman, a refugee from Eritrea.Two years earlier, prosecutors in a murder trial in Edmonton made the unprecedented decision to bring the victim’s preserved vagina into court as an exhibit. Casting aside all existing courtroom ethics, the Crown insisted it was crucial for jurors to see the tissue with their own eyes because the trial hinged on whether an 11-centimetre wound, a slash through the vaginal wall — what caused the victim to bleed to death in a motel bathtub — had been made by a sharp weapon, as the prosecution argued, or by the accused shoving his fist into the woman’s vagina, as the defence maintained. Accidental.In that case, long-distance trucker Bradley Barton claimed the wound had been inflicted during “consensual rough sex.” In a stunning verdict, Barton was acquitted of murder and manslaughter. That verdict was set aside by the Alberta Court of Appeal, which ordered a new trial. The case was further appealed to the Supreme Court ...
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