"According to Dr. Pollanen, Dr. Smith's interpretation was really "a pseudoscientific wound-weapon matching analysis," wrote Goudge. "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. The suggestion should not have been given at all.""
GIST: Justice Goudge discusses Kasandra's case in a section of his report called "interaction with the police at autopsy."... "In a number of his cases, his early informal expressions of opinions to the police were too categorical, potentially skewing the criminal investigation," he wrote. "His recording of these interchanges was as haphazard as his note-taking at autopsy. Requests for timely responses to questions or for supplementary opinions were frequently met with procrastination or were ignored. These cases exemplify practices which can and did cause great difficulties for the criminal justice system." More specifically, in Kasandra's case - one in which he found that Dr. Smith expressed early informal opinions to the police in far too categorical terms: By way of background, Dr. Smith performed the post-mortem examination on Kasandra and discovered a "donut-shaped" hemorrhage on her scalp. After observing the shape of the injury, he 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 woman's wrist-watch 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 therefor reasonable to conclude that the watch was responsible for the fatal blow to Kasandra's head. But Justice Goudge finds that "the method of interpretation was wrong" after noting that two of the independent experts testified at the Inquiry that Dr. Smith's overlay of the watch on to the scalp contusion was an incorrect and misleading approach to the interpretation of that wound. Justice Goudge also noted that although overlaying an object on to an injury might be useful in some circumstances - for example, where there is a patterned object and 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," wrote Goudge. "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. The suggestion should not have been given at all.""
The entire post can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.ca/2008/11/justice-goudges-findings-part-eleven.html
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
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/
