(A CBC Fifth Estate investigation appropriately called "Diagnosis: Murder" exposed the enormous harm Dr. Charles Smith caused to innocent parents and caregivers within Ontario's criminal justice system.
The police probe of Lianne Gagnon - after Smith turned an accidental bump on the head into a suspected homicide - comes under intense scrutiny in the documentary, which ran on November, 10, 1999.
This Blogster would love to see the CBC re-run this powerful program before Dr, Smith enters the witness box at the Goudge Inquiry on Monday under compulsion of a subpoena. (This transcript was filed as an exhibit at the Goudge Inquiry);
It makes us look directly at the human cost imposed on innocent people by Dr. Smith - and those who looked the other way as the evidence of his incompetence mounted - as contrasted with the more abstract systemic issues being explored by the Inquiry.)
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"Malarek: Hearing that Lianne had been taken in for questioning, her father Maurice, jumped into his truck and headed for the police station. Then a senior civil servant not used to taking no for an answer, he wanted to know exactly what was going on.
Maurice: (Lianne's father): Their reply was that the top pediatric pathologist in the province decided this was a homicide and they have to go with it;
Interrogation: You have to understand that these people, they're professionals who...the head pathologist of Ontario...I mean, this is a man who is not making idle speculation. This is a man who knows and who imparted that knowledge to us, that his death was not natural. That's the reality of it.
What had happened was the Ontario Coroner's Office wanted an examination into what caused the baby's death and hired Dr. Charles Smith to look into it. He's the director of the Ontario Pediatric Forensic Pathology Unit at the Hospital For Sick Children/ Although he is not a certified forensic pathologist, Dr. James Cairns, the Deputy Chief Coroner of Ontario, considers Dr. Smith top notch.
Dr. James Cairns: Deputy Chief Coroner of Ontario: He's got his fellowship in pathology, he has his American Fellowship in pediatric pathology - he's only one of four people in Canada who has that. And that particular sub-specialty exam. a considerable amount of it deals with forensic pathology. And he's been doing forensic pathology since 1990.
Malarek: After reviewing the original autopsy report, Dr. Smith came to a chilling conclusion: murder. He based his opinion on an enlarged head, and split skull fractures, which he felt were caused by brain swelling. A possible jaw fracture was further evidence that the boy had been assaulted. Dr. Smith concluded that, in the absence of another explanation, Nicholas' death was attributed to blunt head injury. In other words, it wasn't an accident. Liannes's family was outraged. What they found really odd was the connection Dr. Smith made between brain swelling and Nicholas' head size.
Maurice: Every time we took Nicholas in for his check-up and his inoculations, of course the doctor measured his head. And his head measurements, projected to eleven (11) months old, were forty-nine (49) centimetres - that was the size of the boy's head. It was in the top ninety-eight (98) percentile.
Malarek: So had Dr. Smith checked with the family doctor, he would have found out that the boy had a large head.
Maurice: That was the size of the boy's head in life.
Malarek: The day after the police interrogation of Lianne, Dr. Smith arrived in town to supervise the exhumation of Nicholas' body so he could perform another autopsy. His original concern over a possible jaw fracture turned out to be a mark on bad quality copies of X-rays. Nevertheless, Dr. Smith stood by his conclusion that Nicholas' death was not an accident. He again backed up his theory by the large head, split-skull sutures, and now noted what he thought was a strange discolouration on the boy's skull. For Dr. Smith, this amounted to evidence of foul play.
Chief Alex McCauley was in charge of the police investigation.
Chief Alex McCauley (investigated Nicholas' death); The police obviously didn't have a lot of expertise in dealing with pathology in the medical sense, and so if there's a disagreement amongst the medical evidence that comes forward, then we rely on the Coroner's office to be able to give us their opinion as to which is the more conclusive argument.
Malarek: Armed with Dr. Smith's theory, the police went to the crown attorney. But the theory wasn't enough. Without a confession, the crown knew they wouldn't get a conviction.
McCauley: Well, from our findings, from our investigation, and then from our discussions with the assistant crown attorney, we felt there would not be enough information that would be able to sustain a prosecution.
Malarek: So two years after Nicholas death in December, 1997, Lianne's father was told no charges would be laid.
Malarek: To Maurice: And you thought then, it's all over.
Maurice: But it wasn't. And at that point I think we would've sat back and said, OK, it was a misfortune, an unfortunate incident, sanity finally prevailed and everything is settled. But it wasn't over. It wasn't over by a long shot.
Malarek: When we come back, the troubles get worse.
Pierre: (Lianne's husband): They kept saying that you can be a parent to this child, you can be a parent to this child. Without directly saying it, she was telling me, in my opinion, that if I left my wife, I could have my daughter.
Commercial Break;
Voice-Over Announcer; And now we return to the Fifth Estate;
In August, 1997, Lianne and Pierre got married, and soon she was pregnant. For the first time in what seemed an eternity, Lianne was happy. But that happiness would soon be shattered.
Lianne: About six weeks before the baby was born, my husband got a phone call at work from a Children's Aid worker.
Pierre: She started talking about how the CAS was going to apprehend my daughter the day she was born. And then they kept saying that, you can be a parent to this child, you can be a parent to this child. Without directly saying it. she was telling me, in my opinion, that if I left my wife, I could have my daughter. Otherwise, I could not be a parent to the child.
Lianne: They had received my file from the police, and even though they were unable to lay a charge, that the Children's Aid did not need as much evidence as the police did, and they had enough evidence to apprehend my child when she was born.
Malarek: Despite the fact that there was not enough evidence to charge Lianne, the police had not been prepared to let it drop. They informed the local Children's Aid Society of their suspicion that Nicholas had met with foul play at the hands of his mother. By law, the Children's Aid Society had no choice but to do something about it. They placed Lianne's name on a child abuse registry and put a plan into motion to seize the baby right after it was born."
See previous postings related to Nicholas' case:
Nicholas' Case: Questions going to the heart of Dr. Charles Smith's credibility; October, 2007;
Nicholas' Case: Smith accused of "uncivilized conduct" for bringing 11-year-old son to exhumation of 11-month-old baby boy."
Smith and the media: Part Four; Fifth Estate probe triggers plea to Premier Mike Harris for inquiry into Smith cases; Deaf ears; November, 2007;
Goudge Inquiry: Thinking Dirty; Dr. Cairns defends the indefensible; November, 2007;
Interrogation of an innocent woman series: January, 2008;
Next posting: Maurice Gagnon fights back.
Harold Levy; hlevy15@gmail.com...
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