Conflicting senses, victims, and the courtroom

On February 27, 2015, in an unprecedented practice in Canadian courtroom history, chief medical examiner Dr. Graeme Dowling carried a bucket containing and Indigenous woman’s severed pelvis sitting in formalin (formaldehyde) into the courtroom as evidence revealing injuries contributing to her death. In this article, we focus on how forensic science as an epistemic culture is suited to and fits within criminal law. We assess the sensory implications of elements of the forensic science laboratory, such as human remains, making their way into the court. Aided by the tools of sensory victimology, we interrogate how the production of the victim specimen is constituted. We examine how forensic science, as a blackboxed network of state sponsored medico-juridical knowledge, exposes itself as a site of violence in a moment where parts of an Indigenous woman’s body are paraded through the court for all to see, hear, smell, and touch.