Goudge Inquiry: Forensic Scientists in Ontario Are Not "Advocates?"

Dr. Michael Pollanen, Ontario's chief pathologist, told the Inquiry yesterday that, "It is not the job of a forensic scientist to be an advocate."

"The role of a forensic pathologist is that of a witness and in my view that is the best way that a forensic pathologist can interact with the system," he explained.

Dr. Pollanen's words should be etched in stone - as Ontario's Coroner's system works on the opposite principle: The Coroner is an advocate for the dead.

Proof?

As Winnipeg researcher Kirsten Kramar points out in anarticle entitled "Retributive Jusice: The Disappearance of Infanticide," "you have to look no further than the motto of the Ontario Coroner's Office which is, "to speak for the dead to protect the living."

This motto makes sense in the context of learning from previous deaths in order to prevent new ones.

But it can have disastrous consequences - as we have seen when it comes to Dr. Charles Smith - when a pathologist's zeal to speak for the dead gets in the way of an impartial death investigation.

The problem, as Kramar points out, is that law - including judges and juries - takes forensic pathological testimony to be disinterested scientific fact advanced purely for its inherent value in assisting the truth-seeking element of the trial process.

The evidence of forensic pathologists is therefore considered to be, “highly reliable” as a basis of seeking the exercise of the most coercive powers of government.

But the Coroner’s office, and those working for it, Kramar suggests, are not objective and unbiased as they are committed to “speak for the dead to protect the living," - and they are fulfilling a commitment to professional advocacy for the victim and for potential victims.

This can lead to terrible consequences - as illustrated by former Chief Coroner Dr. Barry McLellan's decision to order an independent review of forty-five cases in order to restore public confidence in Ontario's Coroner's system.

It is also illustrated by some of the cases before the Inquiry in which innocent lives have been shattered by the failure of that system to ensure that investigations into the death's of children were conducted in a straight-forward, fair, impartial and unbiased way - free of assumptions and unstained by ideology.

Kramar argues that the role of forensic pathologists in Ontario as advocates for the most innocent - and as protectors of the public led to a widespread belief, beginning in the mid-1980’ “when the child abuse detection movement was at its height” that categories like SIDS – sudden infant death syndrome – mask intentional homicide.

>“In many such cases, the mothers have been accused by pathologists, social workers, and health care professionals of child abuse and of suffering from Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy," she says.

In a recent CSI New York TV episode a forensic investigator is taken off a case for deviating from his office's high professional standards.

"You have to follow the evidence," his superior tells him. "Science is integrity."

Maybe that should be the motto for the Ontario Coroner's office.

Harold Levy;