Macleans Magazine has played an important role in exposing the harm inflicted by Dr. Charles Smith on Ontario's criminal justice system.
Peter C. Newman's commentary on the issue of Dr. Smith's accountability in a recent issue is therefore significant.
Newman is a legendary Canadian journalist and author.
His views on Smith are set out in a feature article in Macleans entitled, "Doesn't anyone go to jail in this country?: Canada's greatest scandals have ended in a shameful lack of convictions," which appeared on march 6, 2008;
"The latest innocente launched unto our wintry landscape has been Dr. Charles Smith, who for several decades was Ontario's senior pediatric pathologist, looking into suspicious child deaths," the portion of the article focusing on Smith begins.
"The recent hearings into his record unmasked his specialty: making dangerously incorrect conclusions, following loosey-goosey procedures, and providing toxically skewed court evidence," Newman's article continues.
"His testimony shattered dozens of lives, forcing men and women who had done no wrong to suffer humiliation and imprisonment.
He has earned a high place of dishonour on this list because he too has remained free, no matter how many errors in judgment he attempted to excuse with his lame apologies, and regardless of how grievously his victims' lives were damaged.
The venue Dr. Smith wisely chose for his confessional was a provincial inquiry that protects witnesses from prosecution.
No matter how incriminating his testimony, the inquiry is bound to act strictly as a fact-finding vehicle and perform its duties "without expressing any conclusion or recommendation regarding professional discipline matters involving any person or the civil or criminal liability of any person or organization.
The list of Dr. Smith's misdeeds is daunting.
Watching the disgraced physician fumble for a new way of mumbling about how sorry he was about almost every professional thing he'd ever done, I kept wanting to inspect his shoelaces.
I figured that with his record of uninterrupted ineptitude, there was no way he could have tied them properly, and that he was bound to trip at some point during each day's proceedings.
He acted like a man with no centre of gravity, incapable of demonstrating anything as sensible as coherence or plain common sense.
One key piece of crucial trial evidence in the case of William Mullins-Johnson, who spent 12 years in prison for the murder and sodomy of his four-year-old niece, was hidden in the usual messy jumble of his desk for much of that time before it was discovered during a 2005 search.
In a 1994 case having to do with possible incest and manslaughter, Smith mislabeled the crucial DNA evidence, mixing up the samples involved, and then sent the wrong specimen to the Centre for Forensic Sciences.
One mother spent 3½ years in custody charged with the murder of her seven-year-old daughter, on the basis of Smith's conclusions, while another expert quickly determined the girl had been mauled to death by a vicious dog.
This man was a menace not only to himself but to the very notion of justice because (as he admitted during the hearings) he did not act as an objective scientist, but considered himself to be an avenging angel on the side of the Crown.
His testimony provided the crucial evidence that sent Mullins-Johnson to prison. (After subsequent examinations couldn't support the claims of sexual assault and homicide, the Ontario Court of Appeal acquitted him and the Crown apologized for the horrendous miscarriage of justice.)
Mullins-Johnson turned out to be the only person who pierced the crust of Dr. Smith's pathetic self-justifying excuses.
"I'll never forget [what you did to me], but for my own healing . . . I must forgive you," Mullins-Johnson told the wayward pathologist.
For once Dr. Smith didn't mew his usual patronizing apology.
He was momentarily struck silent, and perhaps in that instant realized at last the mayhem he had caused in so many lives.
In his case, Canadian-style innocence had trumped reality once again. But the peaceable kingdom is no more."
Next posting: Part Four: Will Dr. Charles Smith ever be brought to account? Macleans Magazine: The Mullins-Johnson interview;
Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com;
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