Woman seeks exoneration

[#juan]

An Ontario woman hopes to prove she was wrongly convicted of killing her four-month-old son now that the work of the child pathologist in the case has been thrown into doubt.

Sherry Sherrett was convicted of infanticide in 1999 after Dr. Charles Smith conducted the autopsy on her son Joshua.

The case is one of 20 child autopsies that Ontario's chief found Smith to have made questionable findings. The Ontario government has said it will hold an inquiry into Smith's work.

Sherrett told CBC News she hopes Dr. Barry McLellan's findings in those cases will add weight to her efforts to clear her name.

Sherrett, now 32 and the mother of an 18-month-old daughter, recalled the pain of having her other son removed from her home in 1996 when she was charged with smothering Joshua with a pillow.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/04/23/child-autopsies.htmllink

 

[karrie]

When I read about his case, I couldn't help but think how many horrible examples we'd be hearing about in the news. You have faith that these examiners are good and fair at what they do. I can't imagine possibly having your life highjacked by mere human error. It made me think of a dear friend who lost her brother when she was just 10, and he was 8. He had gotten a cold, so his mom had taken him to the clinic. He'd been prescribed meds, and was feeling totally lousy. His mom gave him his medication, and sent him to bed around 6 in the evening. When it came time to send my friend to bed (around eight, she went in to check on him as well. He had died of a brain aneurysm very rarely caused by the cold medications the doctor prescribed. Imagine if some medical examiner had decided to ignore the presence of the medication in his system, it could have looked he'd suffered a blow to the head.

This is the one case where I'm sad to see a new concept I've learned about in my psych course, highlighted in the media. Confirmation Bias.... the tendency to ignore evidence which disproves your theory. He seems to have had a wicked case of it.

I'll be interested to see how this woman's case plays out.

 

[#juan]

When I read about his case, I couldn't help but think how many horrible examples we'd be hearing about in the news. You have faith that these examiners are good and fair at what they do. I can't imagine possibly having your life highjacked by mere human error. It made me think of a dear friend who lost her brother when she was just 10, and he was 8. He had gotten a cold, so his mom had taken him to the clinic. He'd been prescribed meds, and was feeling totally lousy. His mom gave him his medication, and sent him to bed around 6 in the evening. When it came time to send my friend to bed (around eight, she went in to check on him as well. He had died of a brain aneurysm very rarely caused by the cold medications the doctor prescribed. Imagine if some medical examiner had decided to ignore the presence of the medication in his system, it could have looked he'd suffered a blow to the head.

This is the one case where I'm sad to see a new concept I've learned about in my psych course, highlighted in the media. Confirmation Bias.... the tendency to ignore evidence which disproves your theory. He seems to have had a wicked case of it.

I'll be interested to see how this woman's case plays out.

I find it amazing that Dr Smith could find a skull fracture when none was there and on top of that the other damage he "found" was likely postmortem. I'd say this woman had her life turned upside down by either a quack or a psychopath.

 

[SVMc]

I just listened to this case on CBC. It's hard to imagine how it will not be overturned, and almost angering to hear that it has not been overturned. Now, admittedly all the information is coming from CBC at this point and not a court of law, but the main issue seems to be that she was convicted based on hemorages on the babies neck, and a skull fracture that was introduced into evidence four months after the initial autopsy was conducted.

When the case came up that Dr. Smith (the pathologist) was found to have several errors in over 20 cases, they looked over all the old x-rays, could not find the skull fractures, so then exhumed the body, and determined the skull fracture was nothing more than the unknit plates that all babies have in their heads to allow for the head and brain to grow (soft spot - every baby has one), and the neck hemorages were a direct result of the autopsy.

Listening to Sherry on the radio my heart went out to her, she has not been able to be alone with her daughter for the first 11 months of her life, and then CAS suggested that she should not be able to live in the same house of her daughter, she gave her eldest child up for adoption, because she was basically told she would be unlikely to get him back and her choices were to leave him in the system or let him be adopted. Yet, she still refers to herself as "lucky" because she gets letters and photo's from her son, and many mothers don't even get that.

I hope first her case is speedily solved to let her have a life with her daughter, and second that she gets some huge settlement out of this.