In June1992 a woman named Graciela Montans died tragically of injuries caused by a car crash and her autopsy supported that conclusion. But further police investigations resulted in her husband being charged with strangling her to death and then staging the crash to make it look accidental. A second autopsy supported that conclusion.
Using this example, as John Chipman does early in his book, Death in the Family, suggests forensic pathology is far from an exact science. On the basis of his detailed reporting of the wrongful convictions for child murder or child abuse of a number of Ontario women in the early 1990s, Chipman shows how the “inexactitude” of forensic pathology altered the lives of the women he chronicles.
The villain is the disgraced former chief pathologist at the Hospital for Sick Children, Dr. Charles Taylor. When the government finally launched an “audit of suspicious child death investigations involving Smith,” the results were devastating. Reviewers took issue with twenty cases, fourteen of which resulted in convictions. But the damage had been done. On the basis of his testimony in court, women were either unjustly sent to jail for years — Tammy Marquand, for one — or are vilified unfairly as a child abuser — Lianne Gagnon — or live under the suspicion that they got away with murder, as did Anthony Kporwodu and Angela Veno.
The atmosphere in which Taylor was working was one of the big problems, suggests Chipman. After the Montans case, a Coroner’s Council was set up in 1994 to determine what went wrong, and concluded that, henceforth, coroners should view “all deaths as homicides until they are satisfied they are not,” or as then chief coroner, James Young, more pithily put it, “Everyone should be ‘thinking dirty.’”
The results of such “dirty thinking” are tragically evident in Chipman’s book where stories of lives upended by wrongful convictions are put under the microscope. The stories of Tammy, Lianne, Brenda and the others are at turns tragic — the death of one child, the seizure of another by Children’s Aid, jail time — and then redemptive as the women are exonerated.
One of the few of Taylor’s victims to avoid jail time was Lianne Gagnon, who was solidly middle class. Her father Maurice, a senior manager in the Ontario government, stepped up as an advocate for his daughter’s innocence. The Crown ultimately decided to not prosecute the case because of Smith’s shoddy work but the young woman’s life had been, of course, upended, with Children’s Aid adding her name to the Ontario Child Abuser Registry and the care of her newborn child taken out of her hands.
Many of the other women led hardscrabble existences so, when the full force of the law shattered their lives, they floundered. But justice ultimately prevailed. Fifteen years after her conviction Tammy Marquand heard Mr. Justice Rosenberg say hers was “a miscarriage of justice based on flawed pathology.”
When his medical license expired in August 9, 2008, he failed to renew it. But the Disciplinary Committee of the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons ordered on February 1, 2011, that Smith’s certificate to practice medicine in Ontario be revoked after the committee found him to be incompetent.
When his medical license expired in August 9, 2008, he failed to renew it. But the Disciplinary Committee of the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons ordered on February 1, 2011, that Smith’s certificate to practice medicine in Ontario be revoked after the committee found him to be incompetent.
Robert Collision is a Toronto writer and editor.
Robert Collision is a Toronto writer and editor.
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