Death in the Family
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In this national bestseller, a work of vigorous reporting, deep compassion and unerring integrity, award-winning journalist and documentarian John Chipman investigates the lives left ruined in the wake of Dr. Charles Smith's ignominious career.
In the mid-'90s, the Ontario Coroner's office decided that death investigation teams needed to "think dirty." They wanted coroners, pathologists and police to be more suspicious--to "assume that all deaths are homicides until satisfied that they are not." They were particularly concerned about pediatric deaths, which historically had been exceedingly difficult to investigate. There were usually no witnesses; no evidence to gather at the scene; no outward signs of trauma on the body. If the pathologist did not discover the truth of what had happened, child abuse could go uncovered.
Among those charged to "think dirty" was Dr. Charles Smith, Ontario's top pediatric forensic pathologist at the time. But with virtually no training in forensics, Dr. Smith was ill prepared for his work. Instead of basing his judgments on forensic evidence found during autopsies, he allowed himself to be swayed by circumstantial evidence. The defendants were often single mothers--some on welfare, some struggling with substance abuse. And they made for easy targets. Dr. Smith made dangerous assumptions, and the results were catastrophic. Numerous individuals were pronounced guilty, and incarcerated, on his shaky evidence.
This penetrating investigative work explores the wide ripples of destruction caused when the justice system fails, the burden felt by ethical individuals working within that system and the importance of its victims finally being heard.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chipman, a prolific radio producer, journalist, and author (The Obsession: Tragedy in the North Atlantic), brings his finely tuned investigative skills to bear in this first-rate combination of police procedural, courtroom drama, and history of wrongful convictions emanating from the infamous Dr. Charles Smith s flawed forensic pathology reports in Ontario in the 1990s. By introducing the intimate details and backstories of families in which parents were wrongfully accused and convicted of murdering children who in fact died of other causes, Chipman allows readers to empathize with those whose lives have been torn asunder and to imagine how easily they could have been drawn into similarly tragic circumstances. Chipman clearly illustrates how an institutional culture that pushed legal authorities to think dirty and suspect child abuse in far too many cases was enabled by the absence of a robust system of checks and balances. He writes with a fierce immediacy that balances the medical-scientific details of the autopsy world, the legal minutiae of the courts, and the brutal conditions behind prison walls. This work is a painful reminder of the far-reaching, devastating ripple effects on friends, families, and communities when the systems that are supposed to protect basic democratic rights fail.
