Many insights into the wrongful conviction of Maria Shepherd - and the role played in it by Dr. Charles Randal Smith - can be gleaned from the affidavit filed in the Ontario Court of Appeal by Lawyer Alison Craig, an associate of Lockyer, Campbell, Posner, who, along with several other lawyers, did a superlative job of representing Ms. Shepherd and other victims of miscarriages of justice at the Goudge Inquiry; Because this affidavit is extremely lengthy I will be publishing selected sections;
Today's section: Dr. Smith’s Credibility Today:
"There was a large amount of evidence led at the Goudge Inquiry that Dr. Smith was held in the highest regard in both medical and legal and judicial circles in the 1980s and 1990s, and was considered one of the world’s premier experts in the field of pediatric forensic pathology. The vast majority of defence lawyers viewed his evidence as unassailable. At the Inquiry, evidence was given that described the reaction of defence counsel and their client in terms similar to those expressed in by Tom Wiley, the Applicant’s counsel at her trial. The absolute confidence placed by so many in Dr. Smith’s work was misplaced. Commissioner Goudge referred to Kasandra’s case in his Report:
A second area of concern is that, on occasion, Dr. Smith expressed early informal opinions to the police in far too categorical terms. In Kasandra’s case, Dr. Smith performed the post-mortem examination and discovered a “donut-shaped” hemorrhage on Kasandra’s scalp. After observing the shape of the injury, Dr. Smith told the police to search Kasandra’s home for rounded items, such as a knob on a cupboard or something with a distinctive geometric shape that could have either a flat surface or a ring-shaped feature. The police took a women’s wristwatch from Kasandra’s home to Dr. Smith, who found it to be a good match for the injury.
At the preliminary hearing in the case, Dr. Smith told the court that the configuration of the wristwatch was consistent with the configuration of the area of hemorrhage. It was therefore reasonable to conclude that the watch was responsible for the fatal blow to Kasandra’s head.
This method of interpretation was wrong. At the Inquiry, Dr. Whitwell and Dr. Pollanen testified that Dr. Smith’s overlay of the watch onto the scalp contusion was an incorrect and misleading approach to the interpretation of that wound. Although overlaying an object onto an injury might be useful in some circumstances – for example, where there is a patterned object and an external injury – it was inappropriate in this case because of the depth and location of the injury. The scalp contusion was not an external injury – it was in the deep tissues of the scalp, rather than the surface – and the presence of thick hair and scalp tissues altered the appearance of the injury, making such a technique useless. According to Dr. Pollanen, Dr. Smith’s interpretation was really “a pseudoscientific wound-weapon matching analysis”. In this case, all that could be said from the scalp injury was that there was an impact of some sort. To suggest that a particular object caused the injury was misleading. Dr. Smith’s suggestion to the police, made on superficial analysis, led to an improper, inaccurate, and misleading interpretation of the evidence. This suggestion should not have been given at all."
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