Judge putting human face on Ontario pathology probe

Meetings with families affected by wrongful convictions resulting from 20 years of bad forensic evidence "will anchor my work in real, human experience," a judge reviewing Ontario's standards of pediatric pathology said Monday.

But the commissioner leading the provincial inquiry said the private sit-downs are only meant to help him better grasp the horrors of being criminally charged as a result of flawed pathology, and won't have any formal bearing on his final report.

"They must take place in private; they will neither be part of the formal hearing process nor form a basis for my fact-finding," Justice Stephen Goudge said in his first public statement outlining the mandate for the inquiry.

Goudge, a Superior Court judge, said his goal for the public inquiry — which looks at a 20-year span of Ontario pathology from 1981 to 2001 — was to improve standards so that no person will ever have to endure a wrongful prison sentence because of a pathologist's mistakes.

The commission will not report on any individual cases, and overturning or appealing convictions are not part of the inquiry's mandate, he added.

The inquiry stems from the case of former chief pathologist Charles Smith, who Ontario's chief coroner found had erred in 20 out of 45 investigations involving the suspicious deaths of children.

Dr. Barry McLellan concluded in April that Smith often submitted questionable evidence that often — and probably erroneously — suggested foul play. The evidence cast doubt on at least 13 convictions, McLellan ruled.

Some of those convicted have been behind bars for years. Smith had been performing autopsies from 1991 up until 2002 at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, where he headed the pediatric forensic unit.

Protective custody

Bill Mullins-Johnson spent a dozen years in protective custody after being convicted of murdering his niece Vallin, 4. Attorney General Michael Bryant acquitted him in April.

Mullins-Johnson always denied Smith's accusation that he sexually assaulted and murdered his niece. In jail, he resisted intense pressure to take part in programs for sexual offenders.

"I would tell them I am an innocent man in jail and they would tell me, 'You are in denial,' this kind of thing, 'He's in denial, he's in denial, he's in denial,'" Mullins-Johnson said. "When you are up against that kind of barrier, it's very hard."

Goudge will begin the inquiry later this week, starting with the first meetings with families. He will conduct further interviews with families in August.