Pamela Jean George
Pamela Jean George
Pamela Jean George was a 28 year-old Saulteaux woman with two young daughters. She was close to her family at Sakimay First Nation, located in southeastern Saskatchewan. Struggling with poverty, Pamela George occasionally worked in the sex trade in Regina.
Professor Sherene Razack of the University of Toronto has carried out a detailed review of the transcripts of the trial of the two men who were eventually convicted of Pamela George’s murder. The following details emerge from Professor Razack’s review of those transcripts. [1]
On the evening of 17 April 1995, Pamela George agreed to get into a car driven by a 20-year-old white man, Steven Tyler Kummerfield. A second 20-year-old, Alexander Dennis Ternowetsky, was hiding in the trunk. Both men were university students. They had been drinking, and neither had money to pay her. Kummerfield drove the car to a field two miles past the outskirts of Regina. There, the two men forced her to perform oral sex. They then beat her severely and left her lying face down in the mud. Her body was discovered the next morning in a ditch.
Media reports suggest that the police investigation initially focused on other Indigenous people and people living on the street. One Indigenous man was reportedly interrogated four times. One or two weeks after the murder of Pamela George the Regina Police Service received a tip from a woman who said one of the killers had confided in a friend of hers. She was able to provide the names of Kummerfield and Ternowetsky, who were eventually charged with first-degree murder.
Testimony at the trial indicated that on the night of April 17th the two men tried to pick up another Indigenous woman before they encountered Pamela George. At the trial, that woman testified that she had refused to go with them and they hurled racial slurs at her, reportedly calling her “Indian trash” and “squaw slut.”
After the men returned from beating Pamela George to death, they reportedly bragged to friends that they had picked up an “Indian hooker.” Both men admitted hitting Pamela George, but said they doubted they had killed her. According to a friend who testified at the trial, Ternowetsky said, “She deserved it. She was an Indian.”
The case was tried before a White judge and all-White jury. Little attention was given to the life of the victim, apart from her work in the sex trade. The Crown prosecutor told the jury that Pamela George lived a life far removed from theirs, and they would have to consider the fact that she was a prostitute as part of the case. [2] Mr. Justice Malone instructed jurors before their deliberations to bear in mind that Pamela George “indeed was a prostitute” when they considered whether or not she had consented to sexual activity. [3] The Court of Appeal decision briefly considered the prosecutor and judge’s comments and concluded they “were not made for the purpose of conveying a negative view of the victim to the jury.” [4]
Amnesty International is concerned that comments of this nature may reflect social attitudes faced by sex workers in general, and Indigenous sex workers in particular. Professor Razack comments:
[Not] only did George remain the “hooker” but [the two defendants] remained the boys who ”did pretty darn stupid things’; their respective spaces, the places of white respectability and the Stroll simply stood in opposition to each other, dehistoricized and decontextualized. If Pamela George was a victim of violence, it was simply because she was of the Stroll/ reserve, Aboriginal, and engaging in prostitution. No one could then be really held accountable for her death. [5]
The two men were convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to six and a half years in prison. A police officer working in Regina at the time of Pamela George’s murder told Amnesty International recently that he had been “disgusted” by the verdict. In his opinion, some of the people involved in the investigation and prosecution of the case saw Pamela as a sex trade worker, not a human being. He felt the treatment of this case reflected this attitude from start to finish.
Both men were released early: Kummerfield in November 2000 and Ternowetsky in the spring of 2001. In October 2001, Ternowetsky was arrested on multiple charges including assault, robbery, and drunk driving and returned to prison.
[1] Sherene Razack, Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George, in Sherene Razack, ed., Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society, Toronto, Between the Lines. 2002, pp. 125-147. Amnesty International has also reviewed the lengthy appeal court decision in this case, R v. Kummerfield and Ternowetsky, 163 Sask. R. 257 (C.A.)
[2] Razack, Ibid., pp. 145, 151.
[3] Ibid,. pp. 151-152.
[4] R v. Kummerfield and Ternowetsky, Supra, footnote 110, p. 297.
[5] Sherene Razack, Supra, footnote 109, pp. 145-146.
Updated: 29 September 2009