The yard of the Orsainville Detention Centre, near Quebec City, is shown on June 7, 2014. Quebec's human rights tribunal has found that provincial jail guards violated the rights of a Black inmate who was left for hours naked and wet in a cell without a mattress. Judge Christian Brunelle has ordered the provincial government and several guards at a Quebec City jail to pay Samuel Toussaint a total of $41,500 in damages and ordered the province's public security department to create a plan to fight discriminatory profiling. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Francis Vachon
Quebec’s human rights tribunal has found that provincial jail guards violated the rights of a Black inmate who was left for hours naked and wet in a cell without a mattress.
In a Nov. 3 decision, Judge Christian Brunelle ordered the provincial government and several guards at a Quebec City jail to pay Samuel Toussaint a total of $41,500 in damages and ordered the Public Security Department to create a plan to fight discriminatory profiling.
Toussaint, who was 21 at the time of the 2016 incident, was serving an intermittent sentence on weekends.
The tribunal says that he flicked a cigarette toward a guard who had told him to stop smoking in the parking lot, resulting in a series of escalating interventions by jail staff.
Brunnelle says guards found Toussaint unco-operative and cut his clothes off with a knife, moved him around the jail while he was naked, and didn’t follow decontamination procedures after they pepper-sprayed him.
The judge says the behaviour of the guards – at least one of whom uttered a racial slur toward Toussaint – suggests the inmate was racially profiled.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 13, 2023.
