PUBLISHER'S NOTE: Maria Shepherd was not the only innocent, grieving parent - to plead guilty to an offence in order to avoid having to face former doctor Charles Smith. What is extraordinary is that I am aware of five cases in which innocent parents pleaded guilty to avoid what they had been assured would be an almost certain conviction - and much harsher sentence - all because of one prosecution expert. This is extraordinary. The police and prosecutors loved Charles Smith for his ability to extract guilty pleas, close the case, and keep the public calm. (Until the stacked deck of cards began collapsing); All the police officer had to do was hint to the 'suspect' that the Crown's expert pathologist was renowned throughout the province and beyond - and the guilty plea was almost assured. This post deals with Sherry-Robinson American-style 'nolo contendere' plea (acknowledgment of certain facts without admission of guilt) to infanticide to avoid being put on trial for murdering four-month-old Joshua on the basis of Charles Smith's opinion.
GIST: "On January 22, 1996, Sherry Sherret-Robinson awoke to find her four-month-old son, Joshua, lying facedown in his playpen. Years later, she would write that “I will never forget the terror I felt when I reached down to pick him up and discovered that he was blue and his little body was completely stiff.” Sherry called 911, sobbing. In the hospital emergency room, doctors were unable to revive Joshua; “eventually,” she wrote, “the doctors came and told me he had died, and let me hold him to say goodbye.” All Sherry wanted to do was curl up in a hole beside him. Instead she sang him one last lullaby. Over a decade after Joshua’s death, Sherry found that “Even to this day, I cannot get that image out of my head.” When Sherry lost Joshua, she was only twenty years old.[1] Sherry knew that she had never hurt her son; she has always maintained that she did not harm him. However, Charles Smith, the now disgraced former pathologist who performed Joshua’s autopsy, took a very different view. Smith believed that Sherry had smothered Joshua to death. He claimed to have found several injuries on Joshua’s body – for example, swelling in Joshua’s brain and bleeding in his neck tissues – to support his conclusion.[2] As a result of these findings, police and Children’s Aid grew fearful for the safety of Sherry’s surviving son, eighteen-month-old Austin. On March 7, Austin was removed from her care. He was later put up for adoption, and Sherry was not allowed to have any contact with him.[3] In less than two months, Sherry had lost both her sons. On March 27, 1996, Sherry was arrested and charged with Joshua’s murder. Sherry's trial: Sherry knew that she was innocent, but she also knew it was her words against the acclaimed Charles Smith, who would be the Crown’s star witness. Sherry’s lawyer did not believe that she could convince the court to believe her word over his. It looked as if Sherry would wind up spending many years in prison for a crime that she did not commit.[5] At the last moment before her trial began, the Crown prosecutor offered to withdraw the murder charge and proceed with a charge of infanticide instead. If convicted of infanticide, Sherry would face a drastically reduced prison term. In exchange, Sherry would have to agree not to argue against the Crown’s allegation that she had smothered Joshua. So, although she would officially be pleading not guilty to the new charge of infanticide, she would be agreeing with the Crown’s position that she had hurt her baby.[6] Despite Sherry knowing that she had not smothered Joshua, she felt that she had no choice but to accept this offer. She went to trial on the new charge of infanticide, and the Crown read out a list of agreed facts that included the untrue claim that she had smothered her son. The central supporting pillar of the Crown’s case was Charles Smith’s medical opinion that she was responsible for Joshua’s death.[7] Predictably, on June 2, 1999, Sherry was found guilty of infanticide. She was sentenced to one year in prison, where other inmates called her a “baby killer.” It seemed that this stigma would follow Sherry for the rest of her life. Flawed medical evidence, Six years after Sherry’s conviction, however, Charles Smith’s vaunted reputation had started crashing down. AIDWYC’s work on the Bill Mullins-Johnson case had raised serious doubts about Smith’s findings, and AIDWYC was growing suspicious of Smith’s conclusions in other cases as well. In April 2005, AIDWYC wrote to Dr. Barry McLellan – then the Chief Coroner for Ontario – and Michael Bryant – then the Attorney General – urging a full public inquiry into Smith’s work.[9] On June 7, 2005, Dr. McLellan announced in a press release that a formal review would be conducted into Smith’s work on 45 cases involving suspicious deaths of children.[10] This inquiry, led by Justice Stephen Goudge, resulted in the publication of the Inquiry into Pediatric Forensic Pathology in Ontario. In January 2006, Sherry happened to read something online about this inquiry into Smith’s cases. She immediately contacted AIDWYC, which advised her to get in touch with the Ontario Office of the Chief Coroner and request that her case be included in the investigation.[11] The results of this new investigation into Joshua’s death were both vindicating and alarming. The experts who reviewed Smith’s work found that his opinion was completely wrong. There was no evidence to support his finding that Joshua had been smothered to death. The reviewers found that rather than being murdered, Joshua had probably asphyxiated accidentally in the blankets and quilts that had been placed in his playpen. Sherry, who had always wondered if she had given Joshua too many blankets that night, would now have to live with the knowledge that this was probably true. While this innocent mistake tragically led to her beloved son’s death, the mistake was indeed just that: innocent.[12] Furthermore, the experts found that Smith had reached his incorrect conclusion by making a number of egregious errors in the autopsy process. Contrary to Smith’s opinion, there was no evidence of swelling in Joshua’s brain. Even more disturbing, the hemorrhages in Joshua’s neck tissue were actually caused by Smith’s procedures during the autopsy itself.[13] Moreover, the Goudge Inquiry found that Smith sometimes included “irrelevant or prejudicial information” in his autopsy reports, which may have affected his decision-making. For example, Smith wrote in Joshua’s final autopsy report that Sherry was married, but was not officially living with her husband so that she could keeping collecting welfare to help support herself and her two sons. Perhaps Smith was prejudiced against Sherry because he had learned this piece of “irrelevant social history,” which should have had nothing to do with Joshua’s autopsy results.[14] As AIDWYC lawyer James Lockyer put it, the cumulative effect of these mistakes made for “a pretty classic Dr. Smith problem,” since it had become clear that Smith “misdiagnoses, over-diagnoses, and turns natural deaths into homicides.”
The entire backgrounder on this case - written by Sarah Harland-Logan for AIDWYC's web-site - can be found at the link below;:
https://www.aidwyc.org/cases/historical/sherry-sherrett-robinson/
Dear Reader. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog. We are following this case.
I have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses several thousand posts. The search box is located near the bottom of the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and myself get more out of the site.
The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/
