White terror on trial: Courtroom ethnography of the London truck attack


Sophie Marois, University of Toronto

This presentation is based on a courtroom ethnography of the trial for the 2021 London truck attack, in which a self-proclaimed white nationalist murdered three generations of a Muslim family while they were out for an evening walk in their southwestern Ontario neighbourhood. The trial for the attack began in September 2023 and lasted nearly 12 weeks, followed by sentencing hearings in January and February 2024. At the end of these lengthy and often harrowing proceedings, the Superior Court judge ruled that the Crown had persuasively demonstrated the murders and attempted murder of the sole survivor constituted terrorist activity insofar as they were “religiously, politically and/or ideologically motivated” and intended “to intimidate a portion of the public with regard for its security.” The move to prosecute—and sentence—this attack as terrorism is particularly significant in a context where white supremacy and far-right terror have been largely absent from a Canadian counterterrorism agenda that has disproportionately surveilled and targeted Muslims. For loved ones of the victims, “the terrorism designation acknowledges the hate that fuelled the fire, the ugliness that took the lives of Talat, Salman, Madiha and Yumnah.” “But this hate didn’t exist in a vacuum,” they stress, calling for a broader dismantling of the racial and colonial fault lines that continue to run deep within Canadian society. Drawing on the months of fieldwork I conducted at the Superior Court of Justice in Windsor (i.e., where the jury trial took place) and London (i.e., where the sentencing hearings took place), I focus on the courtroom as a key site where definitions of terrorist activity and extremist ideology are deployed, negotiated, and (re)articulated. How do the liberal institutions of a white settler society, cloaked in the veneer of multiculturalism, respond to white nationalist violence against Muslims? How is this violence rendered intelligible as terrorism (or not) within a Canadian courtroom? I explore these questions by paying particular attention to prosecutorial and defence strategies, the role of expert witnesses, rulings on the admissibility of evidence, and victim impact statements. In doing so, I seek to underscore the affective and symbolic weight, oft-expressed in court, of the terrorism label for victims’ and their loved ones’ sense of justice, while also interrogating how the Canadian legal apparatus positions itself as responding to hate and white supremacy through the framework of counterterrorism.

This paper will be presented at the following session: