The charges stem from a sale of three pills. In March 2018, Gordon and her husband of 14 years found themselves homeless, finding shelter in campers and, at the time of the offence, in a tent in someone’s front yard.

They were regulars at the Swift Current Salvation Army’s free dinner program, where they ate with a woman who often complained of pain, begging those around her for “downers,” or painkillers. On a July day in 2018, while digging through a dumpster for food, Gordon came across a bottle containing three pills. Desperate for money, Gordon, who was also battling to ensure her husband’s schizophrenia was kept in check during their period of homelessness, tracked down her dinner companion and sold her the pills. One was promptly swallowed and a short time later, the other two were injected.

The pills were gabapentin, which is commonly used to treat either seizures or the nerve pain associated with shingles. It is a sedative, but not classified as an opioid. However, in 2016 a U.S. National Health Institute publication published a review which found about a fifth of those who abused opiates also misused gabapentin.

Regardless, hours after the Swift Current woman injected them, she was unable to feel her legs or walk and was taken to hospital in an ambulance. Fortunately, she was fine, but the ER visit triggered the police investigation and Roxanne Gordon’s subsequent arrest.

According to court documents, after her arrest, “Ms. Gordon co-operated fully and provided a statement to police.” She spent four days on remand before being released on absolutely ridiculous conditions, including “house arrest” (despite the fact she was homeless), banning her from accessing communication devices including a phone, and a demand to surrender her passport. You know, in case she and her husband decided they would pack up their tent and finally take that dream trip to Tahiti they’d been planning. (She didn’t have a passport, for the record.)

On Sept. 19, 2018, Gordon entered a guilty plea, prompting the joint submission by the prosecutor and her lawyer of a 16-month sentence, which she agreed to serve. In fact, Gordon had already gone about arranging for care for her husband while she served her sentence.

Then another judge stepped in. Provincial Court Judge Karl Bazin, a man who must be deemed a hero in both his vocation and life in general, intervened by way of a simple question that her own Legal Aid-supplied lawyer didn’t bother asking himself: Is Roxanne Gordon of Indigenous ancestry? She is, in fact. Both the defence and the Crown lawyers admitted that
because Gordon looks white, they hadn’t asked.

This triggered the judge’s request that a Gladue report — a pre-sentencing report that any Canadian court can and should request for review before sentencing an offender of Indigenous background as per Section 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code —be produced for Gordon. It’s unbelievable that she advanced as far as she did without the first judge or her lawyer calling for a timeout.

Gordon’s report revealed she had attended residential schools, including the notorious, longest-running Gordon Residential School, which other attendees have described as a horror show of various forms of childhood physical and sexual abuse. She was raised by her abusive, addictions-laden grandmother, who forced her to shoplift as a young girl and who she believed was her biological mother for the first part of her childhood. Gordon’s grandmother eventually committed suicide when Gordon was 16 years old, but by then Gordon had figured out that she could trade her body for drugs, booze and money, a career she pursued for over a decade until she met her husband.

The report revealed that Gordon only completed Grade 9, a fact that the first judge said genuinely surprised her, given she was certain she held a Grade 12 diploma. The report also indicated that Gordon has dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, with an IQ score of 88 (the average score is 100).

But wait, there’s more! In addition to battling her own addictions, the report showed that Gordon also suffers several physical and mental ailments, including sleep apnea, emphysema, hepatitis C, vitamin B12 deficiency, scoliosis, neurofibromatosis, depression and opioid disorder. She takes 11 different medications every day. Yet as of sentencing, Gordon, who had a minimal, unrelated criminal record from 15 years ago, had not used alcohol or drugs since being charged.

She was complying with urine testing. One year after the offence, Gordon said she had stopped using alcohol and marijuana altogether and had attended all her appointments. Amazing.

Oh, and at some point, Gordon had a child, which was promptly taken away from her and never returned. So, let’s recap, shall we?

A homeless, penniless former sex-trade worker with no real criminal history or any drug-related offences, a victim of sexual abuse and a residential school survivor, caring for her mentally-ill husband while managing her own addictions plus an extensive list of physical ailments, sold three pills she found in a dumpster, was charged and pled guilty. Did no one involved in this case care, even a tiny bit, about her rights and well-being?

In the end, after recognizing just how badly this woman had been neglected, further degraded and discriminated against by Saskatchewan legal apparatus, Judge Bazin sentenced Roxanne to 18 months of probation, with a one-year credit. I’m not a soft-on-crime kind of pundit, and I believe that everyone must account for their personal choices, but even I can see that what happened to Roxanne Gordon was a travesty that we’d be foolish or willfully blind to write off as an anomaly.

Instead, Gordon’s case should be sent to the provincial auditor, at the least, to use as a jumping off point to review how this possibly could have happened to her. It’s the least we can do.

-Tammy Robert