Dr. Charles Smith was Canada’s top pediatric forensic pathologist in the 1990s. He would often testify at Ontario trials in criminally suspicious child deaths. The trial of William Mullins-Johnson was one of them.

Dr. Smith was not present at the autopsy performed on Valin Johnson, which launched the rush to judgment in Mullins-Johnson’s case. But his work was crucial to Bill’s wrongful conviction and the length of time he was incarcerated.

Dr. Smith was the only expert witness to testify that Valin Johnson was sodomized at the time of her death. He based his testimony on what he said was a microscopic laceration that had occurred minutes before her death. Someone can only be found guilty of murder in the first degree if the murder occurred while committing another offense, such as sexual assault. Dr. Smith’s testimony was the basis for Bill’s first-degree murder indictment and the 25-to-life sentence that accompanied it.

Dr. Smith didn’t just help send Bill to prison, either. His actions, or inactions, years later, also contributed to the delay in Mullins-Johnson’s release.

The Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted began looking for tissue samples from Valin’s autopsy in February of 2003. Following numerous requests for the slides over many months, with Mullins-Johnson in prison all the while, Dr. Smith said he couldn’t find them and that he didn’t think he had them. In November of 2004, the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario (OCCO) arranged a search of the office.

After months of setback, in just one afternoon an assistant to Dr. Smith found some of the samples. The following workday she found up to 20 microscopic slides. They were on a shelf in Dr. Smith’s office.

When Ontario Chief Coroner, Dr. Michael S. Pollanen, examined the slides, it did not take long for him to see that Dr. Smith had made crucial errors of interpretation.

According to Pollanen, the laceration that Smith said was evidence of sodomy at the time of Valin’s death — the grounds for Bill’s first-degree murder conviction — was not a laceration at all. It wasn’t even an injury. Upon re-inspection, Dr. Pollanen found that laceration was an “…imperfection in the tissue (an artefact) caused by the preparation of the tissue for examination under the microscope.”

Eventually Dr. Smith’s actions and those of his superiors with the Ontario Pediatric Forensic Pathology Unit were scrutinized in the Inquiry into Pediatric Pathology in Ontario or, the Goudge Inquiry. On the stand, on January 31st, 2008, Dr. Smith apologized to Bill:  “Sir, I don't expect that you would forgive me, but I do want to make it — I'm sorry.  I — I do want to make it very clear to you that I am profoundly sorry for the role that I played in the ultimate decision that affected you.  I am sorry.”

Read more on about Dr. Smith in these CBC.ca features:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/crime/smith-charles.html
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/10/01/goudge-report.html

Or read the findings of the Honourable Commissioner Stephen T. Goudge Goudge at: http://www.goudgeinquiry.ca/