The autopsy (part 1): What if justice got it wrong? - The Fifth Estate

2016: Dr. Charles Smith, Ex-Forensic Pathologist, Left Trail Of Wrongful Convictions (but was that all he did?).



Dr. Charles Smith stopped practising in 2008 and was finally stripped of his medical licence in 2011.

Colin Perkel, The Canadian PressCP



TORONTO — The trail of devastation left by a once acclaimed forensic pathologist wound its way yet again through Ontario's top court Monday with the exoneration of a mother wrongly convicted of manslaughter on the basis of his evidence.



The brief hearing, which set aside Maria Shepherd's guilty plea in the death of her three-year-old stepdaughter in 1991, came after Crown and defence said Dr. Charles Smith had made numerous errors in the case.



"Charles Smith was like a god," Shepherd said in explaining her plea. "Who am I? I'm just a little person."



Smith was once Ontario's highly regarded chief forensic pathologist. His opinions on the causes of death, considered unassailable, were frequently the underpinning of convictions that, like Shepherd's, were ultimately found to have been a miscarriage of justice.



https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/02/29/like-a-god-dr-charles-smith-left-poisoned-trail-behind-him_n_9350124.html



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Dr. Smith often found innocent parents or guardians guilty of harming or causing the deaths of children in or having some contact with Ontario's child welfare system when they were available to place the blame on while never finding any reason to be suspicious or concerned about the large number of deaths in group homes or other official facilities for children labeled "difficult or violent."



What Role Did Disgraced Pathologist Charles Randal Smith Play In Ontario's Deaths Under Five Committee.?



He was the founder and head of the PDRC from its inception and implantation.



Dr. Charles Randal Smith was long regarded as one of Canada's best in forensic child pathology. A public inquiry was called after an Ontario coroner's inquiry questioned Smith's conclusions in 20 of 45 child autopsies.



https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2019/08/23/province-orders-childrens-aid-societies-to-review-credentials-of-experts-used-in-child-welfare-cases.html



In the wake of calls for an independent review should the Ontario government order all children's aid societies to immediately review the credentials of all experts throughout the child welfare system or should the police open an investigation??



Maybe the review (or investigation) should cover the all the experts employed by the CAS over the last two decades.



https://www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com/news-story/9565809-province-orders-cas-to-review-credentials-of-experts/



In 1992, the Ontario Coroner's Office created a pediatric forensic pathology unit at Hospital for Sick Children and Smith was appointed director. He had become almost solely responsible for investigating suspicious child deaths in Ontario.



In this period he conducted hundreds of autopsies and testified in court multiple times. He conducted training sessions for lawyers on how to examine and cross-examine expert witnesses, and training for law-enforcement and medical staff on detecting child abuse.[5]



While at Sick Children's Hospital, Smith lived on a farm in Newmarket. His marriage collapsed around the time that his pathology work at Sick Children's received heavy scrutiny.[4] Smith was briefly relocated to Saskatoon and since 2007, he has lived in Victoria, British Columbia, with partner Dr. Bonnie Leadbeater, director of the Centre for Youth and Society at the University of Victoria.



In 1999, a Fifth Estate documentary singled him out as one of four Canadians with this rare expertise.



For more than a decade, Mr. Smith enjoyed a stellar reputation as the country's leading pathologist when it came to infant deaths giving lectures to law enforcement, medical students and other coroners. Several complaints about his work had little effect.



A 2008 inquiry on Smith’s work condemned his “flawed approach” and noted the he “lacked the requisite training and qualifications” to work as pediatric forensic pathologist.



Smith’s findings had helped convict more than a dozen people, some of whom spent years in prison and lost access to their children.



For 24 years, Smith worked at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children. In the hospital's pediatric forensic pathology unit, he conducted more than 1,000 child autopsies.



But Smith no longer practices pathology. An Ontario coroner's inquiry reviewed 45 child autopsies in which Smith had concluded the cause of death was either homicide or criminally suspicious.



The coroner's review found that Smith made questionable conclusions of foul play in 20 of the cases — 13 of which had resulted in criminal convictions. After the review's findings were made public in April 2007, Ontario's government ordered a public inquiry into the doctor's practices.



That inquiry, led by Justice Stephen Goudge and concluding in October 2008, found that Smith "actively misled" his superiors, "made false and misleading statements" in court and exaggerated his expertise in trials.



Far from an expert in forensic child pathology, "Smith lacked basic knowledge about forensic pathology," wrote Goudge in the inquiry report.



"Smith was adamant that his failings were never intentional," Goudge wrote. "I simply cannot accept such a sweeping attempt to escape moral responsibility."



"Dr. Smith expressed opinions ... that were either contrary to, or not supported by, the evidence," Ms. Silver told the hearing Tuesday, reading from an agreed statement of facts.



Smith had been in search of his own personal truths. He was born in a Toronto Salvation Army hospital where he was put up for adoption three months later. After years of looking for his biological mother, he called her on her 65th birthday. But she refused to take his call.



Smith's adoptive family moved often. His father's job in the Canadian Forces took them throughout Canada and to Germany. He attended high school in Ottawa, and graduated from medical school at the University of Saskatchewan in 1975.



https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/disgraced-pathologist-charles-smith-stripped-of-medical-licence/article578634/



https://www.tvo.org/article/death-in-the-family-the-story-of-disgraced-doctor-charles-smith-and-the-families-he-destroyed



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Workers found human tissue in disgraced pathologist's office, inquiry told

Tom Blackwell, CanWest News Service Published: Monday, December 17, 2007



TORONTO - A secretary who worked alongside Dr. Charles (The Ghoul) Smith for years says she found a bag of dried human tissue, a dish containing bones and a child's hospital bracelet during one of her frequent searches of the pathologist's ramshackle office.



Maxine Johnson, an administrative co-ordinator at Sick Children's Hospital, told a public inquiry on Monday she once had pictures taken of the chronically messy office to try to prod Smith to keep his quarters neater. It did not work, she said.



It was during a 2005 audit of tissue samples requested by the chief coroner's office that Johnson and a colleague made the unusual discoveries in the pathologist's room.



"We found some dried-out tissue in plastic bags ... skeletal bones in another little dish," she said.



As well, they discovered a bead bracelet of the kind given to young patients at hospital.



https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/porchlightcanada/dr-charles-smith-inquiry-t2479.html